the streaker

And is it? It's been out for a while now. Balance isn't that important, tbh. But a good TB is a whole other experience and would get me back in the game if it was good enough!

The difficulty was never severe enough that you needed to use stuff to get past something. If you struggled, it's usually cause you made a mistake and a reload would fix that. But not knowing which fight you might actually struggle on encourages you to hoard for that difficult fight that never comes.

Well let me tell you, OP, that I've been waiting for something to top the Godfather trilogy for 30 years and we're no closer to that either.

I don't know how relevant this is anymore (I guess half as effective), but pre- time parasite nerf, an ascendant cipher in light armor and decent dex used to be able to hit ascendancy, then time parasite a group and proceed to machine-gun any cipher power imaginable at a blistering pace. Quite deadly and IMO made cipher one of the better single class classes in the game. Anyone tried it recently? Throwing disintegrates and amplified waves on everybody is serious business.

That's why they have cooldowns on scripts. What simpler way is there that will work for all kinds of different quirky situations?

Yeah but you don't want your cannoneers, surgeons or helmsmen to be putting out fires instead of doing their jobs.

You need to assign deckhands to tasks like putting out fires, etc. no?

Go back for some svef... pretty good display of why charm/dominate is so important for ciphers and how much poorer they are without it.

Wrong forum... but Xoti is religious in a world where gods obviously do exist to some extent, so it's not equivalent to our world.

I suppose over/under-penetration should give you a set % damage increase/decrease (say 10%) for every point you have over/under the target's armor. Not sure why there are "breakpoints," I've never thought that to be good game design.

I don't actually think it's a bad idea to balance based on uniques, because it doesn't take long for your entire party to be outfitted in uniques. Who uses vanilla weapons past the early stages of the game other than maybe guns for that first shot of the fight? And even if I did, +1 pen wouldn't change anything. It's quite rare for 1 pen to be the difference between underpenetration or not, and if it were, I'd get my 1 pen through buffs/debuffs or a different weapon. If I'm in the overpenetration range, I'm probably killing trash mobs anyways so who cares? You'd have to make the pen bonus

It's even worse than that. Defensive Mindweb now breaks on *any damage*, i.e., including grazes, so on PotD it's basically a soap bubble -- one Chill Fog will wipe it from your entire party in a couple ticks, every time, gone before you finish the recovery animation. It's in the same practically useless category as Ancestor's Honor and Wild Leech now. You're right, it is a joke of a level 8 power for non-ascendants. For ascendants, in tight situations it feels worthwhile to throw it down every so often, to soften blows. You have to gear your party for stacking defenses, though, otherwise

A ton of unique weapons have some wicked modifiers that only trigger on crits... and my Ranger/Rogue Maia was second in the group in damage dealt with minimal micro, so I'd say they're not too bad.

You don't play a fighter in BG2, you play a party of 6 characters. There is plenty to do in the battles without having to select every character and use up their class-specific mana to use full attack abilities which have no downside and it makes no sense not to use them all up in every fight. Little thought involved there. Might as well set the AI to use them automatically. Then might as well not have them and make them passive.

What a 180 degree turn for ciphers. They went from the spell spamming class in PoE 1, to the class with the slowest build-up play and weakest caster in PoE2. Every other class can unload all class abilities and resources immediately in every fight, whereas the cipher starts out with minimal focus. Every other class benefits from the switch to per-encounter abilities, ciphers get nothing. Ironically one of the best cipher subclasses, ascendant, gets hurt by leveling up because your focus pool increases and you have to do more damage to get to max, and after you pick the few good powers, the res

I don't actually think it's a bad idea to balance based on uniques, because it doesn't take long for your entire party to be outfitted in uniques. Who uses vanilla weapons past the early stages of the game other than maybe guns for that first shot of the fight? And even if I did, +1 pen wouldn't change anything. It's quite rare for 1 pen to be the difference between underpenetration or not, and if it were, I'd get my 1 pen through buffs/debuffs or a different weapon. If I'm in the overpenetration range, I'm probably killing trash mobs anyways so who cares? You'd have to make the pen bonus

Should give credit where it is due, though. A lot of things PoE2 did that BG2 comes nowhere near. The intertwined quests between the 4 factions, the locations and the views, the sailing and huge game world, the multiclasses and subclasses, plus the things you mentioned. I would say the BG2 quests were, for the most part, more isolated and derivative than PoE2's. PoE 2 goes quite a good job at the wheeling and dealing between the competing factions.

I was also dicking around with shooting up the Brass Citadel for the Huana at one point (reloaded later) and I think almost convinced Maya to stay, but I failed a conversation check due to a level 2 "shady" reputation where she told me she can't trust me, so maybe I'd have even been able to convince her to stay with me there? Who knows...

I do miss me some Underdark/Deep Roads/Od Nua dungeon slog. There's a time and a place for it, preferably some place that tests your characters' endurance where you can't easily rest and recover after every large battle.

I played it through as 1.0 and it was still a great game. Every game will always have a 1.1 patch...

So then make it a random event that gets predetermined/seeded the first time you enter the map, so you can't savescum it without a lot of effort.

This soul fractured death is the first I hear of it, it definitely should have been played up a lot more if it's my main motivation of sticking around. Regarding the wheel thing, I get that, but then Eothas appears to be doing it for a benevolent reason, whereas the gods are freaking out because they'll be exposed and potentially die. The game presents the destruction of the wheel as a noble gesture by Eothas, but does not clearly explain why. How will it make mankind "stronger" if a few scientists or wizards in a lab discover a way of rebuilding the wheel? It appears to be a meaningless g

Nope, it's literally like he never existed in the game if he doesn't make it through that first fight...

If you don't talk to her she won't complain. But if you do she'll raise the issue. Strange design, I know. Hmm, I was on the ghost ship on my way to Ukaizo and talked to her on the deck, had a conversation where she was uncertain about her loyalties, but then finally said something like "oh what the heck, I'm sticking with you." I assume there was some kind of check that was performed and I passed. The watershaper godlike had a similar conversation.

But I would say that DM is the crucial difference there. I have never done any P&P roleplaying but I have no doubt a per-rest system can work very well in that context, because you have the DM there who's probably not going to have you take a nap after every fight (and presumably, in that sort of setting the roleplaying component will be much more pronounced so most people wouldn't want to either). But of course P&P also offers much more flexibility in getting around a fight and such. If your party is exhausted and your casters low on spells, and they spot some unfriendly ogres on thei