Tigranes

The ambushes.... really weren't a good way of limiting resources at all. It was better than nothing, but it was pretty dumb and clearly didn't work outside the P&P context.

A lot of stuff is ridiculously OP without cheesing. People get obsessed with buff/nerf which is a completely false dichotomy. Imagine the Sword of Minsc does 30 damage, and the Hammer of Boo does 15, and the enemy has 25 health. New patch nerfs Sword to 20, and people cry "noooo nerf is bad!!!! just buff stuff!!!" So instead you buff Hammer to 25, and now everybody is 1-hit killing everything, instead of just people with the sword. That's fair, but kind of stupid. So a new patch buffs enemies so they have 40 health. Now the Sword and Hammer are sort of equal, I guess, but you probably need to buff everything else as well, from weapons to spells, because the whole equation has changed. What's the point? Why not just adjust the sword? It doesn't matter if you're putting numbers up or numbers down, "buff" or "nerf" is not actually the most salient part. What matters is the relative strength of these things. Another thing people say is, nerfs make things "useless", i.e. less exciting and significant. Well let's say the Sword of Minsc was released with 60 damage instead. So it's chopping everything into fine dust. Then we nerf it to 30 damage. Is that still bad because it's nerfing? Or, considering how the Sword was already pretty OP at 30 damage in our previous example, is it a much needed nerf? When Sword gets nerfed from 60 to 30, saying "wow that's a big cut because it's cut in half from before" is totally up the wrong tree. The real question is "is this a big/small/appropriate cut relative to other weapons and enemy HP and so on". So I don't care if Obsidian buffs or nerfs. As long as different stuff is in a reasonable zone of comparable strength, so that there are interesting choices.

Read the status description - Confuse now basically means 'friendly fire', not that they will go nuts and attack people randomly. I certainly agree, though, that this change makes confusion well nigh useless. Terrify is the new best condition.

Oh, that's a really cool idea - Empower allowing a once/encounter ability to cast a spell you don't know. Far better than empowering a Minoletta and blowing everything up in one go, and really ameliorates both systems it touches on. I'm sure it might lead to other issues, and I suspect Obsidian have invested too much on the current idiotic empower (e.g. the feats) making it hard to rip it up, but one can dream - maybe a mod?

Maybe he's playing without the skull markers? I never use them, and that's what the whole game looks like.

Nonsense. If they fixed the imbalances, then you could play every race and class as you like and still have fun. Why is it better to leave a game at a place where you have to avoid half the options (whether because they're OP or too weak or whatever)?

I hope not. They should rebalance the current levels and power progression, and expand the range of available abilities & enemy encounters within them. Wouldn't serve gameplay well to go to 30 or something and just be on a constant treadmill.

This is, more or less, at the heart of everything. I don't care if it's per-rest, per-enc, per-squirrel chirp, whatever. The core meaningful difference is: does the system involve throwing the same stuff at the enemies again and again and again? Or does the system involve thinking and making choices about what to do this time - whether because of the enemy, or because of your own expenditure of resources, or something else? At the end of the day, Deadfire too often involves your guys doing the same thing again and again every single battle. To some extent, that is inevitable; POE1 or BG2 also had some degree of that. The point is that most of the changes they made for Deadfire actually exacerbate the issue instead of helping.

Uh, no. They should buff weak stuff when that brings everything on parity relative to enemy strengths, items, etc., and they should nerf strong stuff when that makes more sense. I don't know which would make more sense here, but 2H definitely needs to be a more viable option either way.

It makes sense that if you have 8 eotens they will have some variations in defences, instead of being identical. I'd actually like a little more fluctuation. But yeah, stuff like fire nagas weak to fire is just silly.

It's very very powerful - especially with bonuses like Greater LH that provides healing over time, and/or Elcga bonus that means your target cannot be killed for a few seconds while they heal back up. It's a lifesaver on POTD. It does sound like your issues stem from elsewhere, having to do with how much you're being hammered.

It's kind of weird to get rid of Port Maje, it has a healthy chunk of gameplay - a higher % of the total game than Irenicus Dungeon or Candlekeep. It also has completely normal, full-fledged gameplay after Vilario's Rest. Probably one option for those who want it is to start us off at Vilario's Rest, skipping all the stupid dream sequence, and maybe plopping all the story NPCs on the beach, if it's doable. I suppose an even better solution is start you off there with the ship, so you can go elsewhere and come back? It jsut seems weird to cut out 5% or 10% of the whole game.

But why would you sit there and roll for hours and hours? Why do that to yourself? I don't care about "fairness", it's a single player game. If I decide I want 24 Strength I wouldn't sit there and roll, I'd just use the cheat console and save myself some time. Games should be designed for good, balanced challenge, and then after that, if people want to cheat themselves gold by whatever means, or if they want to hamstring themselves for additional challenge, that's perfectly fine too. Couldn't care less for achievements, they are an awful invention made to abuse people's completionist tendencies and I would be happy if they never existed.

A big part of CRPGs is using the cheese that is available to you, I agree. These days, though, games throw so many bonuses and microtransactions and rewards at you that it just destroys any sense of balanced challenge, so you have to set some limits. It often becomes a good idea to ignore pre-order bonuses because they are disproportionately good to satisfy people who paid more money; and stuff like Berath is ridiculous as well. BG2 had many ways to cheese but it didn't let you start with 21 Strength or a free +2 sword or whatever.

Companion likes and dislikes don't really matter. You don't need a priest to have good healing in the party, e.g. you can easily cover with a druid, a chanter, a paladin. Just get whoever you want and you'll make it work.

Yeah, curious as to how the build fares in 'normal' conditions, I don't want to play with the freebies or spend ages painstakingly cheesing the buffs. I guess without it you have to slice a big chunk off all the numbers, so you have to be far more careful not to get swarmed by enemies in solo conditions. In a party I'm sure it'll still do very well.

Mmm. I can never keep sneak attacks / backstab / assassinate / etc straight. I do miss the good old Infinity Engine backstabbing.

It's nice that people run in the room and scream "this is so stupid OP it is so broken why are people so dumb?!?!?!", so that we can confirm that nobody else thinks large shields are a 'must have'. I'd say it's actually one of the more balanced, clever options: it has a very clear and tangible benefit in the right setup/situation, making it attractive to use, but at the same time it's not so much better than everything else that it's a default. (If only the same was true of, say, dual-wield vs. 2-handers.)

There's nothing wrong with using it, you might prefer the convenience or whatever. I just think it's really weird to post builds & strategies that integrate the blessings, or talk about how strong your guy is. I might use the console an cheat myself money or whatever, but then I wouldn't use that experience to discuss how an ability is OP or how this build is really good.

Bears seem to take about as much punishment as a summoned creature, which sounds about right to me. It's certainly not meant to fight on the front lines and survive the entire battle.

If you're using Berath Blessings, meh. Free gold or free levels or free +2 to all stats is not what I would consider when trying to set myself a challenge or think of clever builds. The game's full of brokenly generous bonuses already.

Most tricks have been discussed, yeah. Enter from south, split them up, etc. When you're level 3 and maybe still running solo or even two, it's mathematically suicidal to charge into the whole group. You can potentially just sneak past them and talk to the boss if you prefer.

Gimped? No, not really. Ranger pets do suck, but rangers themselves get some great feats like Gunner and Marksman, they can spread Marks and immobilise enemies, and combined with Rogue or Paladin for example can lead party damage/kills. Rogues in general go well with most things and are simply amazing. With decent stealth you can walk up to an enemy on the edge of the mob and strike; you can also start by firing an arrow or even hitting everybody with a grenade from stealth, which applies backstab; and after that you can continue to benefit from sneak attacking enemies with eligible maluses. Cipher is certainly a bit boring right now, the shred line has become really poor, especially as Soul Annihilation comes in.

Soulblade/Paladin remains pretty good, I'm experimenting with the AOE 2handers (Whispers, Wahai) to basically save up and do Soul Annihilation on multiple opponents. And honestly, 50% of cipher in POE1/2 is whispers of treason. I haven't tried SA in 1.00, but right now it's a bit buggy where SA damage doesn't correctly display in the log.

Yeah, they need to decide on a design philosophy and then design the game around it. YOu can tack on a few tickboxes for minor stuff at the end, but otherwise you're basically making 1.5 games and it's not going to work. I love attrition, but if they're going to water it down and half-arse it like this, maybe they should just get rid of it and balance the challenges around that?