Tigranes

1.1 changes to POTD were sorely needed and a good first step. But they need a lot more - the difficulty was just in a totally miserable state at release in a number of ways. What bothers me is that so many of the systemic issues were identically problematic in POE1. In both P1 & Deadfire, you gain levels too fast, and because levels give you so much accuracy/defences, you start mowing through many enemies. At least P1 had landmark moments like the dragons to look forward to, and White March also did a lot to provide meaningful higher level challenges. Deadfire doesn't. For people talking about Gorecci Street and Port Maje, 1.1 provides a decent challenge at early levels, just like P1 did at Temple of Eothas, for example. But once you get to ~lv12 where you have some decent gear and the key abilities, it's over. For people saying 'how hard should it be?' POTD should have seasoned RPG players using a full party and the full range of resources available to them - without cheesing, kiting, cheating, etc. For everyone else who does not enjoy that, there are four other difficulty levels, no problem. I don't expect Obsidian to spend huge resources on complex solutions for POTD, though; that only serves a tiny fraction of their player base, so let's be realistic. But it would sure be nice if you could find enemies that actually use higher level spells/abilities against you, more enemies with hard immunities, more enemies that are actually designed for level 15+ parties.

I agree single classes are not good enough, but that's because (1) you level up quickly enough that being behind is not a big problem (same as Drow, etc. in IWD2), and (2) even with multiclass, options are limited enough that you usually can take every feat you want. Your buffs are far too strong, though. Empower is already a broken and silly I Win Button for casters. Maybe adjust how powerful your spells actually are when you cast them - e.g. bonus spell accuracy or penetration options? Maybe have some new feats that you can only take as a single-class?

If everyone were money poor until endgame, that would be great. Most RPGs are horrible at this and you end up able to afford literally everything you could ever want thrice over by midgame. I think if you never buy consumables, plan things out so you only upgrade exactly what you want to upgrade, etc., then you're usually fine - after all, you could easily get by without ever upgrading your ship until endgame if you so chose. If you're really starving for cash, always very easy to rob some houses, or beat up some ship and loot it, or sell the dozens of weapons and such you're not using sitting in stash.

Not perfect, but it makes the game difficult enough for builds to actually matter, and it also tones down some obviously superpowered things. Good.

The point is that your subclass gives you those particular spells for free, so that's part of your decision about which class combination to play.

I don't know I think the poster had a great argument with regards to

I'm not sure how much it adds for me to see a ship on the screen, press left, fade to black, now the ship is 90' rotated. Sometimes the quick and snappy pacing of a low fidelity presentation is far superior.

I've had great mileage out of turning off all of the various displays from the start, ignoring the little 'reaction' pieces in dialogue, and just roleplaying the PC and seeing how it turns out. I don't know how it would ever work well to show the player all these numbers and invite them to treat dialogue like a bunch of +/- puzzles.

It would probably be very slow and clunky, because it's not like you could control the ships and move around RTwP. I prefer text so that it can be resolved faster, whether I'm fighting for real or just getting out of there. Ironically, I think it is already too involved - it needed to be kept a lot simpler as a little sideshow, instead of becoming this weird bloated but still too basic system.

I can't even remember the enemy stats precisely enough, so half the time I feel like the battle is different but I can't tell if it's because of the flat armour/pen change, or the level upscaling, or whatever. Of course, in some places, like the Aloth meeting area, the addition of new enemies is obvious. Take the giant grub in Old City - in 1.00 POTD, never really a threat. In 1.1, I knew that if it grabs my lower-resolve characters, it's likely a crit and a one-hit-KO, so my rogue had to Escape away and have other characters interrupt/paralyse, which added a nice dynamic to the fight.

It's finally a challenge, and this is great. There are five difficulty levels, the highest one should definitely err on the side of too difficult, and vice versa for story mode. If they make POTD too difficult for me, I'll happily play Veteran knowing that the option is out there.

Empower is a broken win button right now, and I find that not using it makes the game a lot more fun. I really don't know who thought it's a good idea - hey let's let a level 10 guy cast something at level 20 basically once every single battle!

Difficulty in Deadfire is, and will always be, massively dependent on your playstyle, your player ability, your party composition, and the order in which you do all the quests and islands. Vacuuming up all the quests and loot in Neketaka before going to the islands will make some of its fights trivial no matter how you jack up the difficulty, for example. And your second playthrough will generally be far easier than the first. So with all that said, I find it more comparable now to POE1's difficulty (non-WM).

Why not continue playing this way? I think it's great that you know what you want and you found an easy way to make it happen. 'Achievements', after all, are ultimately meaningless fodder created solely for kids' bragging rights and to entice customers to spend more money and time. On story mode as it exists you could probably turn on the AI options, faster speed combat and leave for a cup of tea. One thing that might happen later is a mod for making the speed-up button even faster, that could help.

In our world, you're more likely to find weird and interesting hybridisations, where a Vailian comes to the Deadfire and picks up some bastardised Huana phrases in a Vailian accent with a distorted meaning - just as you see with the weird infusion of pseudo-English in, say, Singapore. But it would be far too complicated to handle derivations of fantasy languages and would get impossibly confusing, so what we have is perfectly fine. Folks who insist that it is 'totally unrealistic' might be right in whatever area they're in, but it's well within the bandwidth of plausibility.

Deadfire's taking me longer to get through the first time than POE1 vanilla, for sure. Just goes to show that hours played is never a reliable metric - some people take 30 while another takes 120, and it's not even consistent within a single individual across games. Saying "x took me 200 hours it's definitely super long" just has no validity. And I'm perfectly fine with that size range. I don't think RPGs always have to get bigger and bigger, different games have a different cutoff where the game content and systems start to overstay their welcome. One also assumes that over time, Deadfire will get new content and get bigger like POE1 did.

I suppose. I stopped playing full party style fairly early in the my playing, so I didn't mind hitting max level so early. It is kind of necessary for survival for solo/small party. Then you have to figure out best strategies as you progress through the story, even if you are max level. There are so many ways to make the game challenging without needing harder baddies. Trial of Iron (PoE1), for instance. Expert mode. Solo the game. Everyone here seems to hates rangers. Play a ranger. Solo a ranger. Meh. Just some thoughts. The developers will do what the developers will do. People gonna gripe. It is what we do, I guess. Since the game is so non-linear (which doesn't help the complainers) I do wish I could set Scale Up in Veteran mode. I ran the Tikara (sp) quests way late in the game. I was burned out on it from the beta. Joe I don't play with full size parties either, and I disliked the increased XP gain you got in POE1 as a result. I had to keep using the console to cut away XP, or the party would level like no tomorrow before I had the time to enjoy some of the battles I was looking forward to. 'People do what people will', and yeah, the sky is blue, you could say that to dismiss any criticism or suggestion, good or bad. I do sympathise with the devs on how hard it is to pace the game when it's nonlinear as in POE2.

With POE1, the issue was that you didn't even have to be completionist to reach max level far too early. Roleplay, skip 20% of quests, get max level 5 hours before endgame? Fine. But is that where it is now?

I don't agree with all the points but I agree with the sentiment; as a rule, it's always better to introduce challenge via mechanics and tactics, over HP and mob numbers. Of course, the latter can still contribute to creating a tactical challenge, and in POE2's case it will be a positive change. But points 2 & 3 do attack a wider underlying issue in the POE2 system: the way it variously restricts/enables abilities and combat capabilities, from smaller spellbooks to grimoires to empowers, all combine to a very weird and not particularly systematic experience. You don't really have to conserve your abilities within or between fights, you don't really have to mix it up as much between fights. And that's the key to an enjoyable and challenging experience.

Consumables were overpowered in the first game under certain conditions, now they seem, as far as I can tell, more unrestrained. It's strange how the painstaking attention to detail, sometimes yielding convoluted rules in some parts of the game systems, are utterly missing here, allowing you to vacuum up every herb in the land without trying and then craft enough stuff to win a small island war.

"We all get how per encounter is much better than per rest" No we don't, not necessarily, not always, as if it's a case of ice being colder than fire. That said, I agree: POE2 has abandoned so many of the cornerstones for that kind of gameplay, that the vestigial features like resting have lost coherence. They really need to now go back to the drawing board and figure out what is a simple and sensible way of doling out resources for combat - because the current mix offers no meaningful challenge or decisionmaking.

Hours played vary massively across games and across players, and it has never really been a reliable metric for anything. Jade Empire took me 8 hours, and I know this because I was stuck in the middle of nowhere, fired it up after a late breakfast, and wrapped it up for dinner. I know it took plenty of people 30+ hours. Now add to that games with a lot of open-ended exploration, nonlinearity, people who listen to every voice line, people who pause every milisecond in combat...

I wish I could comment, but funnily enough, my installation of Deadfire is almost entirely bug-free. It wouldn't be fair of me to assume that others' assessments are lies, though, or that my own knowledge must be objective. That would be rather boorish of me. I 'fondly' remember dozens of games, RPGs and otherwise, that fell on my lap with all sorts of gamebreaking bugs, some of them with a big reputation for bugs (oh, Troika), some not. I suppose with Deadfire I'm lucky.

Hrm. You seem very intent on attacking the per-rest system that I never had any particular interest in defending. So I can see how my posts sound silly from that perspective. Perhaps I've misrepresented myself? All I wanted to say was that I felt IE games & POE1 benefited from the mild mix of attrition mechanisms each of them had, and that it's a great pity POE2 throws most of it out. I can see the rationale behind the argument that strong encounter difficulty compensates overall, and partly agree. But I personally enjoy a mix of the two, especially because almost no RPG ever comes close to offering truly punishing encounter difficulty anyway. I'll leave it there as my two cents.

Encounter difficulty is a big part of it, yes, and I'm all for shoring up the lamentable difficulty we have for POTD at the moment. A properly challenging encounter brings out the best of every system. But this was never about "attrition difficulty vs. encounter difficulty" in my mind. I think it's always important to have a good blend of both. IE games & Pillars were never really about very strict and hardcore attrition anyway - POE1 wasn't either. I simply don't see the benefit of getting rid of the attrition side entirely, apart from pleasing a subset of players who enjoy casting 3 fireballs every single fight and healing up to full health every fight (and you could do that in POE1 anyway, especially with a bit of help from the console). I don't necessarily think per-rest is always the answer, but I think if you're going to make big changes to the system, the onus is on you (Obsidian) to come up with an improved blend of mild attrition & strong encounter difficulty, instead of just dropping the ball on both.