Tigranes

I loved the Eothas Temple shadows. Because that's the first test where the game says, "do you understand that there's ref/fort/will and you can target these differently? do you understand that certain damage types will work better against certain enemies? do you understand that you can't walk up to a doorway and create an impenetrable barrier every time? Now, how will you come up with cool new ways to deal with this challenge?" Sadly, it didn't last, but it's a great moment. Why have all these cool systems if you never need to use them? Why compose a song with great bass and drums if you just listen to a 56khz mp3 on a bus with $10 earbuds? What's the fun in having all the rules for basketball and all the tactics if you then get five Stephen Curries to play five Donald Trumps? Systems matter and make things fun when there is a meaningful challenge presented, and it is possible to have such a challenge across multiple difficulty levels without forcing everyone to play POTD or forcing everyone to play with their feet to be challenged.

"Actually, I'm just saying to take consideration for the players that don't enjoy extreme challenge." That's why there's 5 difficulty levels. Why should item balancing or XP curves remain poor? The worst that could possibly happen to such players is that they dial their Veteran down to Classic. It's not like their ability to have a relaxed playthrough is being destroyed.

Never happened to my Serafen, I wish it did. Sounds fun.

Here, an example. My first playthrough, 1.00, story companions, no theorycrafting or metaknowledge, just sailing around the islands with the skull markers turned off. After level ~12, about half the fights, I don't need to pause, and I never use any scripts. Half the party's just standing around. I select my monk, click swift flurry, he's blowing one enemy up every 3 seconds. Maybe tell Maia to fire some arrows. She's blowing stuff up every 3 seconds too. Sometimes, oh, the enemy actually does put up a resistance. So now I need to pause and actually give orders to my party. When I do, I'm usually fine and I never feel like I'm in danger of losing the fight. No drugs or food or kiting or pulling or other cheesing. So yeah, that's a pretty awful state. With 1.1, this still happened, but only after about level 15. Earlier game difficulty I think is pretty good challenge now. Basically, if you very rarely feel like you might actually lose the battle, and if half the time you can have half your party twiddle their thumbs, then that's too easy for POTD. And that's how it was for the second half of the game on 1.00, and how it happens to a lesser extent in 1.1 later game.

There definitely seem to be a few popular no-brainers. My formula last playthrough was Miasma for reducing defences, Enervating Terror to disable, Wilting Wind for AOE, and Minolettas for single target damage. Then there are other useful things like the bouncing affliction Orb, Arcane Dampener, etc. I can't get over how amazing Enervating Terror is, though. If you have decent accuracy on your wizard then over half your battles will involve most of your enemies running around doing nothing.

Why is +6 deflection for 20 Intimidate a bad deal? You are already investing those passive skills somewhere, and half the time, they give you no deflection or other directly combat-relevant bonus. The very idea that you can suddenly invest in Religion or Metaphysics or Intimidate to give yourself a little bonus in your combat capacity is already a bonus - it's not like you could put those points in Reflex or Fortitude instead. It was ludicrous that you could give yourself 20 extra deflection for basically zero combat cost, especially if you are playing with a full party and you can easily afford to cover other desired passive skills. It's like complaining that picking the right hull type for your ship used to give you +20 Fortitude, and now it only gives you +5. The bottom line is that once you learnt about the item, you could give yourself a huge dollop of extra deflection with no real tradeoff to other areas of your combat prowess, which put the Legacy (and other items like it) at a massive advantage over other available gear. A curve like Hieronymous' would be very sensible.

Show me a character that was doing swimmingly in POTD, and then suddenly becomes so useless with 1.1 that they have to drop down to Veteran or the game is impossible to complete. I would really like to see an actual example. Certainly some characters will see a big drop in efficiency, but really, will your party be so crippled? Some clever one-trick ponies, like the wizard that would electrocute themselves using the Deitro Helm, would suffer - but if you're doing something like that, then you're usually good enough at the game, you know you're playing with very fine margins, etc. But sure, I think it would be totally OK to allow difficulty downgrades (you can do it easily with the console, BTW).

Nothing wrong with Berath Blessings, they are basically an easy way to use the cheat console. If some people want to play with infinite money or just 5000 extra gold or whatever, that's perfectly fine. It's not like the devs are balancing the game around them. I expect the same goes for Magran Fires. In POTD I used the console to reduce my XP gain - now there will be an easier way to do it.

I forget, but you get it pretty early, maybe in a Neketaka vendor. I used it all playthrough last game.

It was crazy OP before, and it needed the massive knockdown. How does it make sense that, on top of all the other ways you can stack deflection, you suddenly discover that oh, my guy has 10 intimidate, so now I get 10 more deflection? It became a complete no-brainer for anyone who is stacking deflection, allowing paladins to get their deflection so high that most enemies could never touch them. The very idea of a linear scaling "+x combat bonus per skill" is weird - it was always going to be hard to balance. It needed to be, say, +1 deflection per Intimidate capping out at +7, or some other equation, so that you could get significant bonuses from it without getting stratospheric. Same goes for how one of the ranged weapons, I think? has Arcana-based accuracy bonus.

Quite a few of the changes seem to go in the right direction (e.g. buffing 2handers), but then get too excited with the buffs, so I'm not sure how it would pan out. But the modder has done a great job by making every single change modular.

We are getting to a weirdly fragmented system. "I just beat X on POTD!" someone says, and then it turns out they used that Berath thing to get a gazillion gold and XP to start off with, which means they had a very different experience. I mean, I'm going to like it if new settings allow us to tone down XP gain or something like that, it's just going to be interesting how we share build viability, etc.

The Helstone is available in game.

Good balancing doesn't mean "make the game stupid hard for Triple Crown players only". When you balance the game properly, you allow players on Classic or Veteran to also have a more even challenge, while providing POTD as an option for a minority. Imagine an axe you find early on is stupidly overtuned by mistake and people end up one-shotting everything with it (which is a bit exaggerated, but milder versions of this were happening all over the place in 1.00). Tuning it down doesn't just serve hardcore players, it serves everyone. I don't think anyone ever argued for making Classic harder, either.

Hey, dear Tigranes, The Obsidian VIP. I'm just a player who is indignant at the cut-out content. And I do not see in the absence some of these skills some special meaning for balance or something another. I like the first game (POE1+WM), but the second game seems unfinished, unbalanced. And I'm very curious how it happened? All this talents have in game. Only with console you can add this. Maybe it's bad logic, but it's logic nevertheless. And so sorry for grammar - it's not necessarily good to know wonderful English, if in everyday life you need other languages. Don't worry about VIP, it just means I've been around a long time. I'm not anybody special. Generally, I agree with you - I hate it when companies deliberately cut content and then sell it as DLCs, and other crappy things like that. In this case, though, I don't see anything strange. You asked, why would they code in abilities if they don't end up in the game? And my answer is, that is a normal part of how you create content. A filmmaker doesn't decide exactly what to film, they will often film 8 hours and then turn it into 2 hours, and for good reason. Including every single idea in the game does not make the game better. I don't really see how players are really harmed by not including these abilities. None of them seem to be anything special, none of them actually have any cool gameplay mechanics that make me think "boy, I wish they put it in". If you look at Baldur's Gate, for example, the game files contain hundreds of custom abilities and spells; some of them are used by monsters, but many of them are never actually found in the game. This is far before the days of DLC. This isn't really "cut content" - it's simply part of the backstage. Every book, film, game, song you ever see will always have this kind of remainder behind the scenes. It is fun to learn that you were supposed to be able to summon 'Rivan's soul', though. Maybe there was some kind of alternative resolution to that questline planned?

I think that since these little things are already in the game - developers simply forgot to add this where this should be (otherwise this talents would not have been created) I hope that in the future all this will be in the game. Well, if Obsidian will not be lazy. The company received a lot of money on Kickstarter to create the game, and it continues to make a profit from every sale. And this attitude with 'cutting content' to the fans be is bad. P.S: AndreaColombo, only developers know how everything was conceived. Wrong. Sometimes, you create some of the assets - you might create a custom feat, a weapon, and actually put it in the code - before deciding that you are cutting that quest or NPC because it is not high priority. You wouldn't necessary then delete every trace of the work you had done so far. Other times, you might design one feat for Aloth, and put it in, then decide it is not good - so you cut it, and replace it with a different feat. When you write a book, for example, you might write 20, 30, 50 pages, and then only include 2 of it in the final book. Am I 'lazy' if I don't give you every single version? Would it actually be better for the reader? No.

I think you can play until you hit that point where the difficulty drops (roughly ~lv12), and then install the mod, which will take effect for subsequent newly visited areas & XP gain. That's what I plan to try this playthrough.

Of course. When we're talking about POTD being too easy, we're talking about (1) no cheats, including that berath stuff, (2) no mercs, (3) no painstaking cheesing. You can just play with story NPCs without any grand minmax plan for items or abilities, and the game will still experience a massive drop in difficulty after level 12. You seem to be assuming stuff that isn't true. Ironically, early game is now hard enough, and can even be brutal for, say, solo playthroughs. So some people play up to level 6 and think this is good or this is too hard. The real issue is how challenge disappears after ~12.

But why get rid of factions altogether? They are clearly good for building RPG gameplay and quests. The problem is that they're too half-arsed. New Vegas remains the holy grail on how it should be done, but we know it takes a huge amount of effort to script it all. Each faction being awful/stupid in their own way is totally fine, though. Much better than 'har har we eat babies' faction vs 'oh i am just a big breasted elf woman trying to help everyone' faction.

It's a number of things. You give players an open world experience where they can pick and choose their fights, you give them zero attrition where any encounter can be faced at full strength, you give too many ways to buff up the party from pets to food to drugs to rest bonuses to Empower etc., and then you also have enemies that basically plateau after ~lv12 and only scale up in a limited way, and you also generously dole out accuracy/defences per level. None of those things are awful in and of themselves, but they exert remarkable 'synergy'. Hence you walk around, level 16, with plenty of quests still to do, and your rogue crits & over-pens named bosses because they're stlil running around with 90 deflection after being upscaled. This 'bad synergy' can't really be broken up post-release, because all of those things are pretty major design decisions. All they can really do now is tone down XP gain, buff enemies a bit, and so on.

You realise getting rid of trash mobs and focusing on better encounter design doesn't mean the game isn't combat-focused, right? And you realise there's a whole world of RPGs between Diablo and Planescape: Torment, and the enduring 20-year allure of, for instance, BG2 was that it was pretty good at supporting combat-oriented, story-oriented, mix&match playthroughs? It's OK if you don't care so much for combat.

Tacobell, (1) POE hearkens back to an Infinity Engine tradition which involved a huge number of fans who loved story and worldbuilding, and also a huge number that loved combat and character building. It's not really genuine to dismiss one over the other. (2) You missed the numerous times when we all made the point that yes, very few people play POTD, so it's hard to devote huge resources to it, but at the same time, it needs to at least try to be more difficult, because it is supposed to be extrmeely difficult for grognards, and there are four other difficulty settings for everyone else. It's pretty nonsensical to set the yardstick at "50% of people should be able to beat the absolute hardest difficulty". (honestly, it would be better to have a single difficulty level that they balance painstakingly for most players, and then tack on a story time mode and brutal mode on either side for the minority. managing 5 seems far too difficult.)

It seems to be an Obsidian thing. Pillars was undeniably hardest in the early stages of the game, Tyranny peaked at the end of Act 1 and was downhill from there, and Deadfire is little different. Maybe the majority of their effort is on the early stages of the game? Oh no, it is a CRPG thing. Almost all CRPGs, especially after 2002 or so, share similar systemic problems where after the first 30-50%, the game becomes trivially easy, you have millions of gold, and so on. POE1/2 does a far better job than games like KOTOR, where you really could go for a cup of tea during battles, for example. And many players have come to expect or enjoy this relaxing difficulty; we keep hearing about players who struggle with POE1/2 on Normal, for example. But the whole point of having 5 difficulty settings was to be able to provide difficulty at least on POTD. And the whole point of crowdfunding a project like POE was to provide something a bit more old school than "mash the button and you win!!" trend some recent games have taken. So, while I don't expect big things, I do expect that Obsidian wouldn't make POTD trivially easy on release (which they did), and I do hope that they will go further than what they did with 1.1.

Most of them? From my experience, rogues still send body parts flying, Heralds are still walking mountains, wizards can transform the battlefield with the right setup, etc. I'm most curious about the ranger, but have yet to try it single or multi.

Yeah, it sucks. It's garish to have all the ads and spam covering the entire screen - it's like a pop up ad on their own software.