merkmerk73

yes everyone who enjoys potd but doesn't want to do stupid **** like making tavern adventurers to get past the first island are just a bunch of princesses nevermind many of us have beaten the first game on potd with trial of iron (and had several deaths end those runs) just a big ol princess. gimme some cake, make me fat, and carry me off

Saying it's a T3 debuff is kind of meaningless because blind is given out like candy in Deadfire - in fact it's actually difficult to find the T1 or T2 perception debuffs on most characters. I'm pretty sure my fighter/ranger/paladin/druid/priest party doesn't have a single perception debuff that isn't blind. The cast time is ridiculous when lots of other cipher abilities cast much faster and are more powerful. IIRC it also targets fortitude, which tends to be the highest defenses of targets you're going to want to blind in the first place Long cast times are also awful because they're more susceptible to interruption, so I don't really care much about the recovery time differences.

Who would win, the slayer of Thaos/Dragons/Concelhaut/Llengrath, or 8 shooty bois from the grocery gang?

Eyestrike sucks because of the horrendous casting time

I was ambivalent about her over the original guy until He Waits In Fire and then I was sold that she was amazing

for the record, you did have a bottleneck starting area in PoE. In Act 1 there are like 4 major quests (get the potion, find the lost supplies, deal with raedric, deal with eothas dungeon) and then a minor task to find the cook and resolve the grain dispute and then you're gated by needing to do caed nua. there's literally no way to do anything else until you do that, and you basically need to do those 4 quests/2 tasks to be strong enough to handle maerwald/caed nua. It's not literally an island like Port Maje, but it was for all intents and purposes an island. (in Deadfire the equivalent is resolving the huana/VTC dispute, getting the guy out of jail, dealing with gorecci st guy, kicking the guy out of the inn, and talking to the governor for free crit path experience) you could recruit eder, aloth, kana and durance (though in truth you needed a bit of metagame knowledge to get kana because it basically involved heading straight east past everything to get to caed nua, and then doubling back to do act 1), so if you wanted a full party you did need a hireling. before i got better at PoE1, it meant I always rolled a hireling to get to a full party of 6, more if i didn't want to bother with kana or durance (i found durance as a character to be weak because of his crappy dex). so in this respect it's no different from PotD Deadfire. translation: "please post a video of doing gorecci st without doing any of the things that would actually be expected of someone playing on PotD". if you're going to artificially limit yourself, then sure, you're probably going to find certain PCs to be unviable (though a druid will be fine, one of my early PotD runs was a lifegiver). my argument was that given that the encounter is balanced targeting a full party, any PC is casually viable on PotD. even eder isn't a given in terms of recruitability, depending on what events you had in PoE1 set up. I would not expect an arbitrary PC + Xoti-only party to have a fun time at Gorecci St. That's why there's an inn. It's literally part of the game. (also i'm not sure how using sparkcrackers to lure people around is "exploiting" game mechanics. it seems like by its description that's literally its intended purpose. "While they don't cause any damage, they can be used to distract patroling enemies.") You seem to really like arguing based on your post history here for the sake of arguing. PoE1 POTD bottleneck was not a problem because it was entirely doable without any crazy metagaming or exploit strategies - PC/Eder/Aloth/Kana/Durance was entirely capable of clearing Caed Nua, as well as the Temple of Eothas if you wanted to - and with that you could find a 2nd party member and do whatever you wanted. It's entirely different from Deadfire because you are going to struggle to get through Port Maje bottleneck with only your story companions and the degree of difficulty is out of whack with the rest of the game on POTD except for aforementioned areas. Unless of course you -only use stealth/dialogue resolutions -hire adventurers This really isn't hard to understand Translation: I shot my mouth off with a smarmy 'false' and can't back it up so now I'll move the goal posts POTD doesn't come with a 'you are required to make your own party IWD style'. Your argument that it's part of the game is completely asinine - so is just lowering the difficulty, or using berath blessings. My point is that the POTD starting island, and a few other fights, are poorly tuned while the rest of the game is not. I like the game on POTD, I don't care for the early Port Maje bull**** As far as Eder being unavailable - edgecase not worth considering. Standard Deadfire companion experience is PC + Eder + Xoti on Port Maje.

false PotD rebalancing was tuned for people who like to powergame. The most trivial part of powergaming is to have a full party of five. A casual PotD-er could get away with just one hireling, but otherwise I would assume from beginning to end that you are expected to have a full party, unless it's physically impossible (i.e. Vilario's Rest where at most you just have Eder). In my mind, people who are stubborn about not using hirelings for Gorecci St or the Engwithan Digsite are making the game harder for themselves, intentionally or not. Those encounters aren't balanced for a party of three (though they are imo easily doable with three via pulling and splitting), they are balanced for a party of five. With a party of five, Gorecci St or Engwithan Digsite are challenging, but not really that much more challenging (if at all) than any other PotD encounter. w/e your argument fails because the first game didn't fall into any of these problems in POTD and remained challenging except for the lack of good scaling You didn't have to hire adventurers like you're playing icewind dale, you didn't have a bottleneck starting area that limited your story companions except the Caed Nua which was entirely doable with some prep. In fact early game POE1 on POTD was extremely well balanced with some really tough fights that were all totally possible even on trial of iron. Port Maje is the complete opposite of that - yet after Port Maje the vast majority of the game is very well balanced and challenging. Also please post the video of beating grocery street @ level 3-4 with Eder (fighter tank), Xoti (Priest), and PC (druid lets say) on POTD, level scaling on and let's hear how many saves it took - no bull**** kiting or exploiting game mechanics I'll wait. edit: I haven't actually done that sidequest before and my current party is 17/18 so I can't comment. I'm sure there are a few more busted level scaling encounters.

I'll take JE Sawyer's stat system over most other stat systems I've ever seen in an RPG. It's not perfect, but very few are good enough to have even what little flaws PoE/Deadfire has. It's almost like the very fact that one of the main complaints is about...drumroll...strength checks using might...is a huge indicator of the system's success and lack of flaws.

Re: some of these comments about POTD POTD is supposed to be hard and challenging. Not borderline impossible without metagaming strategies such as * using dialogue/stealth as your only option (bathhouse street fight, grocery street) * using the tavern to make a full party on Port Maje * skipping the drake and all the other engwith pit stuff to sneak into the dungeon and finish the quest there so they're all gone when you exit Or, at least, the game should be consistently that stupid across the board - it isn't. POE1 had some fights like the bear cave or Raedrics hold you needed to skip and come back to later. There was a couple tricky bottlenecks like clearing Caed Nua for the first time but you could have 5 party members (PC, Eder, Aloth, Kana, Durance) by then The vast majority of POTD in Deadfire is very well tuned - highly challenging but not dumb. Most of Port Maje is dumb if you're playing a regular PC that isn't some min/maxed stupid multiclass combo and using story companions only. Grocery street is flat out impossible for many PC classes unless you skip it or use stealth and the sneaky-sneaky 'leave map enter map from outside town' strategy, and the digsite animals can be outright impossible for some classes too. If you decide to do a POTD trial of iron run, especially with level scaling on (which makes some of the mobs even harder even if it's supposed to scale both down and up), you simply have to be aware that there are a handful of badly tuned mobs and fights with regards to the quest level description. The rest of the game is great and very challenging. My ideal POTD would just fix some of the stupidity of grocery street/digsite, some of the yseyr temple skeletons (including yseyr himself who is impossible if you try to fight him at the appropriate level w/ scaling on - 3 red skull boss + 4 or 5 red skull adds), the bathhouse streetfight, and I think that's it You should be able to get thru those areas with any roleplay you choose - including any class as PC, using only story companions. As I said before 95% of the game falls in line with this, there's just a few broken areas where the mobs are way overtuned for their quest lvl.

Yeah you point out some silliness but Sawyer's stat system is genius and the best stat system in any RPG, period Yeah you can still dump some stats, oh well, it's better than anything else.

I really, really like what you've done here and I want to save this post. I'm sure you might have some further iterations but it seems like you solved the biggest, glaring problem with the AR vs Pen system - the deadzones. There are massive deadzones in penetration for the player, as well as massive deadzones in armor for the player If you watched Josh Sawyer give the GD conference talk about deadzones in D&D - this was the #1 problem he wanted to get rid of in the stat system, only to re-introduce the same problem in Deadfire! So well done. I think I will try this mod out for my next playthrough. edit: also really love what you've done with the inspirations! Many of them felt very weak, especially some of the T2 and T3 ones which were often kind of hard to come by in the first place! edit2: May I suggest buffing Crowns for the Faithful to be T2 inspirations as another mod. It was very overpowered in PoE1, arguably, but is laughably weak in Deadfire - a mere T1 inspiration for resolve/perception/int - one of which is negated by a lower level and popular buff (Dire blessing), the other easily replicated by the level 2 Holy Meditation buff - all of these with bigger AOEs!

I would personally not recommend ironman unless you can mod in autosaving. Deadfire is way more stable than PoE1 but still not stable enough. In PoE1 I lost a few runs from soft-locks and hard crashes, and I would still prefer doing ironman in PoE1 than in Deadfire because of the presence of autosaves that I can backup easily. (In fact, I may never do ironman in Deadfire for precisely this reason, even though I could count on one hand the number of crashes I've had in 600+ hours of playing. All you need is one to ruin your day.) Also as asnjas recommends, if you have to ask about possible instadeath moments, perhaps you're not ready for an ironman run (especially since you haven't seen the entire game yet. at least see what the crit path is like. sentiments about the game difficulty can be obsolete due to a lot of rebalancing that has occured. Back in 1.0, Ashen Maw/Ukaizo was a cakewalk even at level 14. Now, Ashen Maw requires a little bit more skill and can spiral out of control, especially on Berath's--you could end up pulling an entire section of the map. Depending on what faction you side with, you can end up with a brutal high-level fight just doing that as well. And even at level 20, Ukaizo fight can be a challenge if you're used to just brute-forcing your way through a fight and/or aren't used to the multi-part encounters that become more common in SSS or FS. Though I guess actually you can trivially skip this fight if you don't care about the role-playing consequences to do so.) i think every time you talk to rymrgand you can be instakilled, both in VTC and in BoW. I seem to remember having to reload because I sassed off a bit too much. there's also a few encounters on the world map and one in a dungeon that can result in insteadeath if you don't have the right stats. Sevearl encounters (especially in SSS) are generous with giving you injuries, which can be death if you have too many. Not so many of these just on the critical path though. Do you know which things can result in instadeath, other than talking **** to Rymrgand? I'm prepping for a Trial of Iron POTD run, but I don't think I've run into anything that instakills you without the right stat checks yet. I do not want another disaster like what happened in my PoE1 run with Trial of Iron on - I was wrapping up White March 2 and was at the end of the base game, with almost everything completed, and got Aloth permadeth'd with all his gear in that Durgans Battery elevator - was furious.

Ya i beat it before no prob. This time i swear it got up rolled big time. These skeletons have 60+ deflection. Did you last play before PotD got rebalanced? Because yes the entire first act got much harder. This - after everyone complained, they did another POTD pass - most of the game got way better (esp with scaling on), but there's a bunch of broken ass fights on the first island that are just incredibly dumb unfortunately Stuff that I found so far that is completely out of whack with the recommended level on POTD: - grocery street - street fight after luminous bathhouse messenger bag - the skeletons at the digsite from this post - some of the mobs and the boss (if you fight him) of the Berath temple dungeon thing in Nekataka. There were some skeletons there that were 3 red skulls and remained 3 red skulls after I got 2 more levels. Most of it is really well done with scaling on and remains very challenging.

I agree 100%. The difficulty complaints are absurd. If you want to break the game by rolling a custom party with a bunch of stupid 20/20/3/20/3/3 type builds, then that's your fault. If you want to try and find the most overpowered multiclass and spam combusting wounds + wall of fire or w/e to beat every encounter, that's on you. I play with story companions and use a mixed party and with POTD and level scaling the fights are very hard - in fact I just barely beat the first blight boss in SSS with my level 17/18 party - everyone was out of gas, consumables were used, and he was barely finished with some under-penetrating arrow shots from my last couple guys standing.

I guess I'm one of the few that doesn't mind the naval combat at all, my only real criticism of it is that the system probably cost a lot of development time and energy that may have been better spent elsehwere. I mean, do we expect them to build an elaborate ship combat system for a game that is an isometric IE inspired game? Well no, of course not What's there is already pretty complex - with the crew / cannons and maybe loses a little steam where the ship battles become a text-adventure