Crucis

Your companions could not possibly know in advance some of the **** the factions ask you to do. It's only natural they'd object when their personal values feel stretched to their limit, not necessarily before. I wasn't asking for the companions to know this stuff in advance. I meant that some might prefer to be able to read here in the forums which companions might object to which factions. Yes, very spoiler-y. But some just might prefer not losing a beloved companion over not being spoiled. Different strokes for different folks, and all that.

This lose a companion thing over faction choice seems rather annoying to me. You spend hours and hours building up a character and get attached to having them in your party, not to mention the synergy of your party's combat tactics, etc. And to have that all thrown out the window by a faction choice seems rather annoying. Maybe it'd be nice to know ahead of time which companions have problems which factions, though OTOH I suppose that could be rather spoiler-y. It does sound like it makes a good case for using side kicks (presuming that they wouldn't do this) over companions.

The first time through, it's kind of cool to have what amounts to a wrapper and some background for the character creation process. But after the first time, the info-wrapper becomes tedious. It'd be nice if after the first time, you could go straight to the character building to be followed by a little dialog and then poof, you're in your body and you're off.

I have no problem with Epic plots. But I will say that letting you know right from the start that the story is epic seems unnecessary and arguably can cause the story to lose some of the epicness over time. OTOH, if you start small with, say, the BG1 iron crisis, you have a small scale problem that you work to solve and you start picking up pieces to some larger plot that you are unaware of at the start of the story. You have an increasingly larger mystery to solve, which can cause the epicness of the underlying main story to grow and grow as you uncover more and more. I don't want to rip on the PoE2 story because I've only barely gotten started. But it seems to me that POE1 and 2 bear a similarity with BG2, where in each 3 stories, you start with someone done you wrong in a very personal way. OTOH, in IWD1 and 2, despite their arguable flaws for being very linear, you were just a relative nobody with a party of nobodies who ended up in the adventure. And in BG1, you weren't a nobody, but you didn't necessarily realize that from the start. Of course, I suppose in PoE1 and 2, it's hard for you to be a nobody given that you become a watcher at the start of PoE1, though that doesn't quite put you on the same level of importance as you are in BG2. Watchers, while rare, are hardly gods and not entirely unheard of. Perhaps the PoE1 storyline would have been a little better if there was no connection to Thaos at the very start. You could still have been turned into a Watcher, but without any need to go chasing after this crazy guy (who turns out to be Thaos). Obviously, a few tweaks here and there to the story would be needed to give you a reason to go to Caed Nua and the to Defiance Bay. And then to go after Thaos. Maybe someone hires you or otherwise inspires you to hunt for the assassin who killed the Duke and to stop what his dastardly plans were. (Maybe Lady Webb wasn't killed and it was she who sends you after Thaos.) I don't think that the general PoE1 story line was irredeemable from the fault of seeming too epic from the start. I think that it could have been tweaked in some minor ways to allow its epicness to be more of a growing mystery that you had to reveal like peeling an onion. I have no idea how PoE2's story will play out. I'll remain hopeful.

I'm not so hung up on active abilities. OTOH, you are 100% correct about how many of the ranger specific abilities are tied to the damned pets. It becomes really obvious when you start thinking about a Ghost Heart build where you don't need to focus on the pet, and you realize that your options are really limited.

You don't have to use rangers for ranged builds. It's just that you end up with ranged builds that are more in keeping with the class you select. Build a ranged fighter, and you end up using the weapon specialization and mastery passives, and other things that buff weapon damage. Build a ranged rogue, and you end up with a a character who is more focused on abilities more in keeping with rogues, largely working off of sneak attacks, and such. And so on and so on.

Hence why I never left it to auto-resolve. Of course, I liked the combat so heading back home for some R&R and a little practice time with the local rowdies (aka the people who dared attack my castle)!

I am a few hours into Deadfire and can confirm that, the pacing just feels wrong at the start. One day, you watch the gods discussing and get the feeling that this is an important matter. The next day (actually a week later, since you travel by ship) you start running errands in a really huge city. Eder even makes a comment about losing track. Also you have a lot of stuff to micromanage, especially your ship, but also companions, factions and your personal fame. You have to make a lot of choices, like distributing skills on a borderline overwhelming skill tree, but can't really judge their outcome, since combat is very rare. And select a ship crew out of lots of NPCs, which all have different skills and character traits. And spend money you don't have on ship stuff you can't judge what it does. And hey, your cook broke her hand and morale goes down, since you don't have beer on board, manage that! Also there are several factions you can side with or not, but don't really get an idea how and why that matters and what consequences this will have in the future. There is one larger dungeon (a mansion of some kind), but the reason to enter it seems miniscule and also requires to take a side between two factions, where you can only talk to one of them. All other fights are simple brawls, a lot of buildings and persons have no meaning (yet). I feel very lost and without a red thread. I know sooner or later everything will be pieced together, but the start is really rough. First you are drawn in, then you are let go. Everything you do feels pointless compared to your really important main quest. It's still a good game, don't get me wrong I may be an oddball here. I know that some people wanted a more involved stronghold in/after PoE1. I didn't. I don't play this sort of game to play "Sim Stronghold". I'm not interested in having to manage a castle, or a stronghold that's a ship. I'm much more into the quests and the combat and the stories. To me, managing a "stronghold" is an unnecessary distraction. I do get that you need to get from place to play in the Deadfire and that requires a ship. I'm just not sure why we should need to have to pay attention to the minutia of running said ship.

I guess that the point is supposed to be that there are no "good guys", no "white hats" in the Deadfire. And maybe the writers felt that they wanted to go this way to be different. Call me "old school", but I guess that I just like having at least one obvious group of good guys around to align with and not feeling like I'm stuck trying to figure out which faction are the least worst, the least evil. From a role playing PoV, if what Voss says is true, i.e. that the Valians are indeed grinding up luminous adra and thus the souls within for profit, I'd think that the Watcher (not to mention Xoti) would see that as rather disgusting, though perhaps it depends on what one thinks is happening to those souls after they've been ground up. Or maybe how the Gods view such an activity. I could see Xoti being a person who would hate you if you aligned with a faction that did this. I've already reached the point where Aloth has made it rather clear that he's very anti-traditionalist. I don't know where the other companions stand on the other factions, though I suppose that the blue orlan would favor the principi, and might hate being aligned with a faction that was against the principi.

Doesn't exactly sound like any of these factions are "good", with the possible exception of the Huana. They all sound like they have the negative points.

And while the BG2/TOB was rather straight line as I recall (been a LONG time), that side quest dungeon was pretty epic.

I have a question about rogues and rogue skills, particularly Mechanics. Do you need rogues in PoE2? But the question is deeper than it seems. It's definitely not about whether you need a rogue's combat skills. It's more about their non-combat skills. It appears that the skill system has been changed from PoE1 where after the first 1-2 skill points each successive skill point in a skill cost multiple points. Let me put it another way. Can you take a Cipher (who apparently also starts with 2 points in Mechanics) and end up with a character who can be every bit as skilled in Mechanics as a Rogue? Just for the record, I happen to be one of those players who loves sneaking through dungeons and searching for traps and such.

LuccA, the problem is that if the only thing the game cares about is chasing the main story line, it can end up feeling like the IWD games where the game was literally a single direct line of maps one after another, and the closest thing to a side quest was something that could occur within a single map, or at best a multi-map area (like the final building/castle/tower in IWD2). That can get exceedingly boring after a while, and can make the game less enjoyable for multiple replays because there's largely only one way to play it, and replayability depends more on party composition than an an ability to change the order in which you do things. Exactly. There's always going to be a disconnect there, it's an unavoidable consequence of games with any kind of open-ended exploration. And as I recall, even the magnificent BG2 had tons of unrelated side quests as well. It's one of the reasons it was so beloved. You didn't have to play them in the same order. They took you to many different areas that were unrelated to the main story line. Frankly, without those side quests, I'd think that even the best (main) story line would get rather boring after the first or second play-through.

The problem is that with the BG and IWD games, they existed in a familiar setting, at least for many D&D veterans, and the games didn't have to spend an enormous amount of time and effort to set up much of anything, except perhaps your immediate surroundings. They could take for granted that you knew some things, like who the deities of the Forgotten Realms were. But PoE1's Eora was a totally new and unfamiliar setting. It seems to me that there's bound to be a pretty fair amount of information they feel is needed to be passed along.

LuccA, the problem is that if the only thing the game cares about is chasing the main story line, it can end up feeling like the IWD games where the game was literally a single direct line of maps one after another, and the closest thing to a side quest was something that could occur within a single map, or at best a multi-map area (like the final building/castle/tower in IWD2). That can get exceedingly boring after a while, and can make the game less enjoyable for multiple replays because there's largely only one way to play it, and replayability depends more on party composition than an an ability to change the order in which you do things.

Vaporlocked. Brain freeze. Can't freakin' get off the dime and make up one's mind.

I was also "vaporlocked" at first, even though I'm a veteran of POE1 as well as the old Infinity Engine games from way back. I ended up picking a Black Jacket fighter, no multiclass. Honestly, I'm not really feeling the love for the character at the moment, though that's probably much more my problem than the game's. Also, for what it's worth, the game does suggest that new players avoid multiclassing.

Except Werner Herzog did shoot Aguirre in English before dubbing it in German. As for accents in PoE, I'm in no position to judge (I'm a Frenchman who worked very hard to lose his accent in English and ended up with more than a hint of a Scottish accent) but I don't really care for American accents when it comes to fantasy games/movies. Don't get me wrong, I'm ok with most (including Edér's) but I have to say that as far as I'm concerned the one that gives me a hard time is Xoti's. I like the character but she takes me out of the game every time she speaks. I much prefer how Iselmyr sounds. See, I actually like Xoti's accent. She sounds like a very rural farmer's daughter with her very rural American accent. The accent I disliked in PoE1 was Sagani's. She always seemed far too bland for someone far from home. I'd have preferred her to have a more exotic accent of some kind. Admittedly as an American, I can understand where someone from some other English speaking country with a very different accent might think she sounded "exotic" to their ears. But to mine, she sounded like someone I could hear any day of the week.

I think that Durance was written to be a character that most players probably wouldn't like. I haven't gotten all that far into the game and I could be wrong. It just seemed like Durance and GM were "broken" people, so to speak. I hope that none of the other characters have this sense of brokenness about them. Thus far, Xoti doesn't feel "broken" in this way to me. Perhaps a bit naive and backwoodsey. But she seems to have a good heart and wants to do the right thing.

I don't mind Xoti. She sounds like a rather rural farmer's daughter type. I do wonder if some people who dislike her (not necessarily saying you, Ackwell) don't like her because she seems like too much of a hick or redneck because of her accent, while they're are much more urban and look down on such people in real life.

It's hard to be tanky if you're not in heavier armor and/or using a shield to help your deflection. The idea of a frontliner using ranged weapons seems ... bizarre. The whole point of using ranged weapons is so that you can hide behind the tanky frontliners, and pew-pew them with your machine gun arrows or hammer them with your guns. I can see the jack-of-all-trades off tank sitting just behind the front liners using guns, perhaps pistols (though they're a tad short ranged), but then jumping into the front line when you need more warm bodies. But a front liner in light armor and using ranged weapons seems difficult and almost self-defeating. But if you want to give it a try, more power to you.

Slack83er, I guess that it depends on what you mean by a "sort of ... ranged tank". You can certainly create a "warrior" who is balanced between ranged and melee combat. The question sort of becomes, just how much do you want the warrior to be fighting at range vs fighting in melee? Are you talking about a warrior who carriers a gun or maybe a crossbow and takes an opening shot on the enemy as they close on the party before switching to melee weapons? or are you talking about something more like a character like, say, Sagani who might be strongly committed to fighting at range, but does have the capability to fight in melee if pressed to do so? The former character isn't going to worry about reload times, because he'd be taking only the one shot before switching to melee weapons and is probably in heavier armor, while the latter character is probably wearing lighter armor because he is trying to maintain a higher rate of fire and only fights in melee when it's forced upon him. I've played companions like Kana and Durance as off-tanks who would use both ranged and melee weapons, largely depending on what was most necessary at the time. I would tend to see Sagani more as a backliner who wants to keep slinging arrows with a hunting bow and only have to fight in melee if some enemy suddenly popped into the rear of the party, like a shadow.

You don't need to have all three attributes maxed out to get through the story. Also, if all you care about is the story, there's a story time mode that's supposed to be super simple. Don't know how simple from first hand experience, mind you, just that it's about as simple as it gets. Also, not all attribute checks require a max value to pass the check. Plenty of them require some value between 12 to 16. Max value checks seemed rare to me, IIRC. Also, why do you say that you suck? What problems are you having?

Vane, I agree with you on the attribute system. I didn't like that Might combined both physical and arcane power. I also didn't like that Barbarians essentially needed to have a high INT to be good. For what it's worth, PoE2 is supposed to have some changes to the attribute system. I don't know all the details because I'm not a backer, haven't played the backer beta, nor have I watched any of the videos covering this stuff. I have heard that they're turning Might back into Strength. And I think I might have heard that they're moving spellcasting related "power" off of Might/Strength and onto a different attribute (Resolve, I think). This seems like a good thing. It's always seemed to me that the different classes should have different attribute needs, much more so than was seen in PoE1. It seems like certain classes should really require pretty good Resolve, while others might require a good Strength, and so on. I won't argue that all Barbarians should be dumb, but there's something wrong when the way the overall system is constructed that the best barbarians need to be geniuses. It seems to me that barbarians as a class should care considerably more about Strength, Constitution, and perhaps Dexterity and Perception. That is, the more physical attributes. OTOH, it seems to me that classes like wizards and ciphers should probably care more about intelligence, perception, and resolve. And perhaps paladins should care about the physical stats, but perhaps Resolve as well. It just seems to me that Resolve would be a very important characteristic in a paladin's makeup. Of course, some classes already value some attributes they probably should, like Rogues valuing Dex and Perception, though sometimes I think that it wouldn't hurt for there to be additional ways to enhance the value of these attributes to a class. Like perhaps Dexterity could generate a modifier for disabling traps and opening locks. Basically, perhaps different attributes acting as modifiers to certain (appropriate) skills. Ah well, whatever. Just some random thoughts...

I have been wanting to play one more run through PoE1 before PoE2 arrives, but I haven't been able to come up with a character concept for my PC. (I am *NOT* looking forward to the 5 character max party size though.) I've been somewhat tempted to try a paladin, possibly built as an "undead hunter", but I'm hesitant because I love having Pallegina round so much and am wary of playing with 2 paladins in the party. I like the variety of classes, and the potent interaction of having a wide variety of different classes in the party. You can also take Abjuration, coupled with Sworn Enemy it annhilates spirits and summoned creatures. My issue with it is that it competes with sacred Immolation at 13 and by 15 the game is almost over and there is only a few places left with spirits. If you want it for Durgan’s battery you need it at 13 and I wouldn’t skip Sacred Immolation for it. Yeah, the downside to playing an Undead Hunter or any other monster specific type of "hunter" build is that you can be really strong vs that specific monster group, but then you have no general bonuses for everyone else. At least if you're taking one or two of those added damage vs monster group talents. There are some paladin abilities that are a little more general but useful vs the undead, like the abilities that are useful against being charmed or confused or whatever. It's nice for a pally to be able to give a charmed team mate a love tap to uncharm them.