Crucis

I generally agree, Indira. Though one thing you really have to watch out for in a party with characters who can cast any sort of revival spell is if you have AI enabled, you can risk having an injured character get knocked out multiple times when sometimes it might just be better to leave them knocked out and safe from multiple knockouts in a tough that risk death. I've had the AI revive a character who was knocked out in the middle of a mob of enemies, and then had that character proceed to get quickly knocked out a second time. I'm doing pretty much the same as you. I'm willing to push on with a single injury, but once someone takes a second one, it's time to fall back and rest. Also, I watch for characters having some sort of annoying curse on them. I'll usually rest to get rid of those.

Bingo! I personally don't feel the need for every little detail to be part of the game. But, dammit, resting on a regular basis due to character fatigue should be! I could have probably done without the having to deal with food and drink for the crew of your ship thing, but it doesn't really bother me much either. I guess that I find all this lazy play style crap to be annoying. It makes me wonder if those doing the complaining about it grew up being mostly game console players rather than computer and PnP gamers, because from my experience PnP and computer games have a greater desire and tolerance for detail than console gamers who seem to want everything dumbed down to an arcade level of play.

Ah so it is mainly "cause tradition" or "cause this is what they do" i figured as much. You would think they would then flesh it out more, make it more than just some pointless tedium, if they have to have it because "unwritten dnd RPG rule" It does do that, it removes that challenge entirely - replacing it with a challenge that's easier/better to balance, not needlessly restrictive, not pointless and/or tedious and so a much healthier and fun game design - per encounter. The actual combat becomes the challenge (when they get round to balancing it post-release..) where every fight is a big fight, instead of it just being about how well you can hoard and restrict yourself from the gameplay (lol) auto-attacking the majority of combat on "trash mobs" while saving and using the big stuff to roll the big fights, before resting and repeating. It's going to be great. I completely disagree. I think that you're advocating a very lazy play style.

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? With abilities and health regen between fights, individual encounters can be more dangerous. Because of this system, I try to punch above my weight far more often, seeking out red skull fights and seeing if I can pull them off. It also means I don't have ot conserve abilities as a resource, so I can comfortably steamroll trash mobs quickly. All the fights in PoE1 felt like they just dragged on. Resource management isn't fun. Playing with abilities and spells to solve an encounter is. I see it 180o differently. Having to manage your health resources was a challenge and that's what made it more fun. Seeing how long you could push into a dungeon before you were forced to fall back and rest. What you describe as "fun" is completely mindlessness. About the only resource you have to worry about is the 3 injuries before death. Big whup. As for going for those "red skull" fights, you could do that too, in PoE1. It's called reloading, for crying out loud! It was a challenge, but any joy that could've possibly come out of that challenge was marred by the fact that running out of camping supplies meant you'd have to suffer through numerous lengthy loading screens (despite having the game on SSD.) Fortunately, PoE2 loads much faster, so it wouldn't an issue this time around. I'm sorry, but I actually found that to be a challenge too. One of the most fun and challenging things that happened to me in my first run of PoE1 was in the Endless Paths when you could go down/fall a hole from something like level 3 to level 6 (the one with the drake that barred your way from going deeper into the dungeon), was trying to fight my way back up through 3 levels with a fixed amount of camping supplies and a fixed amount of endurance. THAT was a serious challenge, because I had to get past that Ogre level which with my relatively weak party and my own personal inexperience with the game was very difficult. It seems to me that as much as people are complaining about the fights being too easy in PoE2, what they really want is no REAL challenges. They want it all handed to them on a silver platter. None of what you said had anything to do with the loading screen times, which is what the post you quoted was specifically complaining about. I was replying to your comment about running out of camping supplies, since that would have been the root cause of needed to go through all those loading screens. or are you going to say that if the loading screens were near instantaneous you wouldn't be complaining, but I'm kind of doubting that.

I can't agree with this. Oh, I think that there are a LOT of things that are improved, but not everything. 1. I don't like the graphical abilities trees. I really HATE having to slide my mouse over all the damned abilities to be able to read what each is. HATE HATE HATE it!!! I greatly prefer POE1's text based version. This one is pure bovine fecal matter, it's so bad. 2. I don't like the lack of any need to rest from simple fatigue. They implemented diurnal cycles around the rest of the game and yet removed it from the party. That's just wrong. Your party members should need to rest at least once per day or suffer increasingly bad fatigue penalties. And that's just on the most basic level. On a more detailed level, perhaps the party should have to rest after some number of engagements as well, because just doing nothing is less exhausting than fighting battle after battle. The trick with this is though that you can have a number of smaller engagements in quick succession at times when the bad guys in the second group don't get triggered to come running to assist the first group. So maybe this would be solved by some sort of count of the number of enemies you've fought, or perhaps how much time you've spent in combat (probably better). Maybe that's too much underlying complexity. it just bugs me that you don't have to rest at all in this game unless you've taken injuries or been hit by curses that can only be removed by rest. 3. Subclasses. I have no problem with the concept of subclasses. I just don't like the lack of flavor in them. They're bland as hell. Subclasses seem to me to be little more than (usually) 3 different play styles for each class with next to no attention being paid to developing some true flavor to the subclasses. Personally, I think that most of the old kits in BG2 felt like they had more flavor than the subclasses in PoE2, which is a shame. And let me say, for me, it's not that subclasses are unplayable. They're just much too bland in most cases for my taste. I could go on, but I don't have the time right now.

I have to disagree. I do not agree that per encounter is "much better" than per rest. I don't even agree that it's better at all. I think that per encounter reduces the challenge of limiting your spell use properly so that you can go as far as possible on one rest. I also think that resting needs to be in the game even more than it is now. It's ridiculous to recognize diurnal cycles without recognizing that the characters should have to live according to them as well. Parties should absolutely need to rest, at least once per day or have an increasing amount of fatigue reduce their capabilities. I don't know what you mean by attrition based game play. But if you mean the need to manage one's resources, then I think that you're wrong and are essentially advocating a very lazy style of gaming.

Regarding rapiers specifically, I don't see why they're even a weapon type used in this game. They don't seem to be at all compatible with an era where heavier weapons are common. Rapiers seem more like a weapon of nobility for a different era than an era where you have warriors using much heavier swords, maces, and all those 2H weapons. Regarding quarter staffs, I don't like that they're reach weapons in the first place. To me, they should not be a reach weapon at all, but should be a fast 2H weapon. Unlike all other 2H weapons where you hold the weapon at one end and their weight makes them slow to swing, a Qstaff is held in roughly the middle of the staff, and is probably a good deal less heavy, and much more agile of a 2H weapon. I do like the Qstaff's special ability to be used defensively (i.e. bonus to deflection). Something else. I don't know if others have noticed this, but I'm almost never running across any Estocs. And I'm not just talking about named Estocs. I'm talking about your average ones as well. It's like no one in the Deadfire is using them. They may be available in the stores, but they're pretty much non-existent as dropped swag.

It's kind of a tradition in D&D style games that when you have specialist wizard schools, the banned school is one which is perceived as the opposite of the selected school. I will say though that I wish that the devs had gone a very different route with wizard subclasses, and not used the old wizard schools concept. But rather gone with different concepts. Elementalists could be one subclass, specializing in elemental spells. I'm sure that there are other ideas out there. Like maybe a "conjurer" (not like the conjurer school, though maybe it would seem that way), where the conjurer greatly favored spells that "conjured" up things like weapons, possibly summoned creatures. Maybe some kind of hardcore Arcanist whose spells weren't elemental in nature but were based on "arcane" damage. Of course, this might involve coming up with a bunch of new spells, and might be considerably more complex than the wizard "schools" concept.

I don't think that charm spells are useless if the charmed enemy isn't doing a lot of damage. For starters, just the fact that he's no longer hitting your guys is a good thing. Secondly, because they're on your side, the remaining enemies can attack the charmed enemy, which means that there's a second enemy not attacking your party, plus he's hurting one of his buddies and hurting him for you. The most important thing with charm and confusion spells is reducing the number of enemies actively attacking you, and possibly getting some of them to flip sides. The flippers do damage to the reds, and the reds do damage to them. And it's all good in the long run. The one rule that I have when choosing who to try to charm is to pick the healthiest ones. There's no point in charming a nearly dead foe, because he'll just die easily to his enemies. But if you choose a nice and healthy foe, you get a guy who will hopefully eat a lot of damage for your team, and perhaps do some of his own in the process.

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? With abilities and health regen between fights, individual encounters can be more dangerous. Because of this system, I try to punch above my weight far more often, seeking out red skull fights and seeing if I can pull them off. It also means I don't have ot conserve abilities as a resource, so I can comfortably steamroll trash mobs quickly. All the fights in PoE1 felt like they just dragged on. Resource management isn't fun. Playing with abilities and spells to solve an encounter is. I see it 180o differently. Having to manage your health resources was a challenge and that's what made it more fun. Seeing how long you could push into a dungeon before you were forced to fall back and rest. What you describe as "fun" is completely mindlessness. About the only resource you have to worry about is the 3 injuries before death. Big whup. As for going for those "red skull" fights, you could do that too, in PoE1. It's called reloading, for crying out loud! It was a challenge, but any joy that could've possibly come out of that challenge was marred by the fact that running out of camping supplies meant you'd have to suffer through numerous lengthy loading screens (despite having the game on SSD.) Fortunately, PoE2 loads much faster, so it wouldn't an issue this time around. I'm sorry, but I actually found that to be a challenge too. One of the most fun and challenging things that happened to me in my first run of PoE1 was in the Endless Paths when you could go down/fall a hole from something like level 3 to level 6 (the one with the drake that barred your way from going deeper into the dungeon), was trying to fight my way back up through 3 levels with a fixed amount of camping supplies and a fixed amount of endurance. THAT was a serious challenge, because I had to get past that Ogre level which with my relatively weak party and my own personal inexperience with the game was very difficult. It seems to me that as much as people are complaining about the fights being too easy in PoE2, what they really want is no REAL challenges. They want it all handed to them on a silver platter.

*Sigh....* You missed the point of my post, it was to prevent people from trying to excuse or justify the game's poor ship mechanics with the fact that they were also intended as a mobile stronghold. My comment wasn't calling out anyone specific? It's something called reading between the lines. I see, so anyone who disagrees with your point obviously has no idea what they're talking about and needs to pay attention to the game more.... because even when pointing out things with reasonable logic, they're still wrong if their outlook doesn't lineup with your opinion. Smh. I'm not sure what makes you assume I'm a beginner in D&D/IE style games or what old games have to do with these new ship systems and mechanics have to do with the origins of other mechanics and systems that aren't well connected enough. Not sure if you realized it but I actually backed the game and have alot of experience in not on the first PoE1 game but classic IE games such as Icewind Dale, Baldurs Gate, etc. I would be willing to bet my life that I know more than you on the subject but fail to see how that off-topic remark is irrelevant to this conversation anyway. Lastly, no, I disagree, people aren't "whining" or "complaining" here, just giving critical feedback that I know Obsidian already realises themselves. It's not because they aren't good at the game or don't underatand how it works, not sure where that mentality comes from, the game isn't complex - especially the stripped down ship mechanics. You obviously haven't read the comments too carefully, the game's difficulty has nothing to do with it, it's the lack of mechanics and polish. Just because you can settle with something done passibly or poorly, doesn't mean those who have something meaningful to say on the subject are somehow lesser than you. In fact, those who speak out and are honest about the game's shortcomings are the ones who truly care about the game and want ot to be the best game possible. Just saying. Whine some more. Just saying.

It would be nice if there are multiple floors on a relatively small building if they could load the entire building as a single area, and when you go from one floor to the next, you just get "teleported" (not really, but you get the idea) from the first floor part of the map to the second floor part of the map, without the need to load a different area. But maybe there are other issues we don't know about that would prevent this.

Heck, I don't see why you should be able to change your roster (between those companions you already have in the active party and the reserve) anywhere but back at the ship. Seriously, ya going to yell down from the Queen's palace to your ship for Pallegina to get her butt up to the palace to trade places with Eder? Come on.

Even if they have all spells available, it doesn't help majority of them ARE trash. BEside Devotion, HEal and Iconic projection, you can grab whatever and feels like you're missing nothing. Even go full talent if you feel like it. But the point is that *IF* you have them all available, you can at least experiment with them. Right now, you look at the choices and the limitation forces you to select only among the most generally useful spells and ignore the situational ones.

First world problem. Learn to be patient. You get frustrated about this. I get frustrated by the lack of patience and complaining about it. Yes, moving around a city involved a number of load screens. It's always been this way in the Infinity Engine and now the Unity Engine games. You just can't load up the entire city of Nekataka as well as every single building into memory. That's just not reasonable. As for the possible overuse of storybook scripts, perhaps there are instances where they may have used this method unnecessarily. The Narrows, for example. The Narrows itself could have been an area unto itself. But then again, it would have involved loading another area. The only other option might have been to make the Gullet map larger so that the Narrows could have taken up a portion of an enlarged Gullet map. I think that what it comes down to in most cases with the storybook scripts, they could have replaced them with an area map, but that would have involved more wait time, rather than less.

Guys, I think that you're all missing the OP's main point, which was due to the change from a priest having access to his entire spell selection (even if he only chose to use a few of them regularly) to having to select which spells a priest would know pretty much makes a fair number of seemingly situational spells unlikely choices to take. Then you can only take a small handful of spells, you're more likely to choose the most generally useful spells, and not bother with more rarely used, situational spells. It seems to me that priests kinda get boned by this mechanic. And players never really get a chance to try out those more situational spells because they just don't dare take them. It seems like it'd be better if priests had all of their spells available to them, even though their number of total castings at any given spell level remained limited, as it currently is in PoE2. (This might also be true of Druids, as well, BTW.)

Why would you get flak ? Combat skills being per encounter really helped alot of the classes and playstyles to actually be viable. Take the rogue being able to go into stealth per encounter for "backstabbing" is now viable due to per encounter skills. There are some people whining about how wizards got nerfed hard, as if there was any chance that the devs would let wizards have the same number of spells they had in PoE1 just with per Encounter. That would have been ridiculously unbalanced. Personally though, I liked them being per rest. I liked the idea that you needed to ration your spell use as a wizard or other per-rest casting class, unless you intended to break immersion and just spam resting after every battle. I enjoyed the challenge of having to manage my limited numbers of spells on Durance and Aloth, while trying to get as far as I could before falling back to rest. I also liked the PoE1 Endurance vs Health system for this same reason. However, I can deal with the per Encounter casters. One thing that's really lacking though is that there's no need whatsoever to rest on a regular basis. You can travel for weeks on end without resting, as long as you haven't taken any (or too many) wounds or some curse you want to remove. This isn't right. I'd really like to see some kind of endurance system added that limited the length of time you could operate between rests. I would say that it should be assumed that you're getting regular rest while you're traveling on your ship. Maybe have it timed such that you're assumed to get a Rest every time your crew eats/drinks, so that someone couldn't just spam a rest just by getting on the ship and immediately getting off. Regardless, there really should be an endurance mechanic that sort of forces you to rest from time to time, or suffer from increasingly more severe fatigue penalties.

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 every weapon I wanted to highest level and was still left with over 400000 gold. And galleon was the first purchase I did. I haven't gotten as far into the game as you, Wormerine, but I have to agree with you. Between those little farms, finding food and drink at those various little spots on islands, and finding food and drink while exploring larger areas, I've never had to buy any food or drink at larger ports and cities. I'm at the point with my ship's very high morale that I can get away with feeding them +0 moral food/drink most of the time, and even plain ol' (-1 morale) water balanced off with a +1 morale food. Heck, when my ship's morale is at 99-100, I don't even mind letting it slip a little because I know that I can boost it back up any time I want. I also have a ton of hardtack that I won't even bother putting in the ship's food queue. I save it for my party when I need to rest to recover from wounds or curses. I've been very wary of upgrading items (i.e. weapons, shields, armors) too freely, because I don't know how limited the crafting supplies are, and don't want to make any mistakes on this. And I'm still sailing around in my trusty little Defiant, with her only upgrades being better guns, and slightly better sails (and those I only upgraded because I got them as booty after a ship battle).

I too, hate when people try to excuse or justify the poor ship combat/mechanics with the lie of "Ships were intended as a stronghold, not for combat" especially when Obsidian stated different so many times. I hope so as well, as underwhelming as it is, Obsidian should place ship combat and mechanics of ship in general as high a priority as balancing the game. Such a huge piece of marketing for reaching consumers, should also reflect in the efforts of the actual game. Just saying. 1. I don't think that anyone here has said "Ships were intended as a stronghold, not for combat". They're obviously both. And I think that given the nature of the Deadfire environment only the most clueless of individuals would have assumed otherwise. 2. I personally don't see any serious problem with the ship combat system as is. I feel no need to either excuse it nor justify it. I didn't understand how it worked when I first started playing the game. But I happened to watch a youtube video on ship combat in POE2 which did a great job of explaining how it works, and I've had no problems since that time. The way I see it, the people who complain the loudest about the ship combat system probably haven't invested any time or effort into learning it. And just want to whine and moan and generally throw a temper tantrum because it wasn't perfectly self-explanatory or intuitive right from the start. Here's a heads up for you. All of PoE's and the old Infinity Engine D&D games also took a while to get a firm understanding of how their regular combat worked too. But for some reason, this seems to be overlooked. People took the time to learn those systems, but now seem unwilling to put the same effort into learning this ship combat system. Just sayin'.

Some people who played POE1 wanted a more involved stronghold. Well, they got it, because in PoE2, your ship *IS* your stronghold. That's pretty much why you have to manage all the details of your ship, like food and drink, and a crew, and ship vs ship combat. As for survival in your ship early in the game, yes, your ship early on is pretty weak. Which is why you have to use the map function to evade other ships for a while. But after a while, your ship becomes a good deal stronger, without even buying a larger, more powerful ship. Making the Defiant stronger involves recruiting a crew to fill all the necessary slots. It also helps to have some reserve crew so that if you take injuries in a battle, you can shift people around and still keep the ship operational. Also, your ship's ability to fight boarding actions becomes stronger with both a full crew as well as building up a reserve of companions/sidekicks, because those reserve companions/sidekicks who aren't in your active party still help defend your ship during boarding actions. So, even if you have a full party of 5, but a reserve of 4-5 extra companion/sidekicks, that's 4-5 more strong combatants helping out, which makes a huge difference. I'm only maybe (just guessing) halfway through the game (my party is at level 12, IIRC). And there are very few ships now that I run from in my upgraded Defiant. Mostly only the ones that the encounter rating system tells me are probably too difficult for me. But other than those few ships, I'm more than willing to take on pretty much anything at sea with my trusty little Defiant. And only 10 hours? My god, you have no patience.

It seems like a waste to not use an arquebus (or at least some other firearm) given Maia's Gunhawk range subclass. Arming her with a non-gun ranged weapon is essentially giving up all of her subclass' benefits.

One thing that I like when I'm crawling through caves and abandoned dungeons is that they're fairly dark. And that if you want decent light, you need to have torches or lanterns. It's always bugged me to go into basically uninhabited (by people, at least) caves and abandoned dungeon complexes and to have torches all around. I think that it's cool to have to carry torches, etc. And I love how some of the caves in PoE2 are fairly dark and how they look when you use a torch or the Xoti's lantern or the pre-order lighted saber. Love the dynamic shadows, etc. This isn't to say that all dungeons should be dark. Obviously, some will be inhabited and thus have lit torches, etc. But it's nice that some are dark, because it really improves the ambience of a dark, mysterious cave for it to really BE dark.

I found one in the store room under the Crookspur dungeon.

Having to rest every two minutes doesn't make the game any better/harder, it just makes it more of a chore. You didn't HAVE to rest constantly. If you did, it was because you wanted to spam per-rest spells rather than ration their use and depend more on characters of classes whose abilities weren't per-rest. In short, you didn't want to play the way the game was designed to be played.

Thanks for the quick answer, guys. I haven't upgraded much thus far. Only the Gladiator sword, that I can recall. I love that sword with its special sword/shield ability that gives you a deflection bonus when you're using a shield with it. Makes you a good deal harder to hit. But I also just found Modwyr and it's hard to not want to work on it too.