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 +3 or so for it to start mattering, which might not be a bad idea. i played in potd with scaling options. i find many mobs have high armor that i often find myself -1/-2 under penetration. That's huge -25%/-50% damage. So +1 does help alot if you asked me. Only for estocs versus extremely high armor targets, otherwhise you'd be far better off switching to higher pen unique single handed weapons or guns

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 it does nothing.

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 rest don't really help. Also, you usually never hit max a second time. In my mind it is strictly a multiclass option. The flat damage bonus is never bad, and you only have a select few good powers so you don't actually need any more points in cipher after picking those few. It's a shame that defensive mindweb is not available to mc ciphers, because I love using it in combo with borrowed instinct and a shield to create an untouchable aura around my guy at the start of a tough battle. They freaking nerfed this one too, you used to be allowed to spread the party out after casting the mindweb, now it's an aura... (edit: wrong about the aura, it still sticks after you separate)

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 +3 or so for it to start mattering, which might not be a bad idea.

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 gesture, outside of some way-out-there theories that are not supported in-game. How is Eothas going to "expose" the gods if his actions only destroyed the wheel and his physical manifestation at the same time? The only thing I buy into is that Berath told me to do it, and if I refuse, I die right at the start of the game and get reborn as a rat...

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 their path, they can maybe just go around, or prepare an ambush, or attempt to scare them away / convince them to leave (using an illusion spell maybe, or just a really convincing / intimidating character). Hell, they could set fire to the surrounding forest and drive them off that way. And I should imagine that in P&P gaming, beating a tactical retreat is actually possible as well (realistically, having seen you off the ogres are probably not overly interested in chasing you to the ends of the earth). I would love for this to be actually possible in computer games as well. But you'd need an equivalent of a DM in the game to be able to do that, and in general an engine that allows for vastly more flexibility. That is very hard to actually do, of course. I seem to have side-tracked somewhat, but yeah... per-rest systems work just fine in that context. To me, it never felt it translated at all well to cRPG. The cost of resting and time elapsing is just too ambiguous for it to balance very well. Which isn't to say that per-encounter doesn't have flaws, it clearly does. Having longer-term tactical aspects and being incentivised not to use the same abilities every fight are certainly things I would like to see very much as well (and in general, more organic design than discrete resource pools and spell levels and power levels and such). I don't thing 'per-rest' can properly accomplish that though. Have you tried the Baldur's Gates and the Icewind Dales? You can get ambushed while resting in dangerous areas, or while traveling through dangerous areas. I'm not saying the balance was immaculate, but there are better ways of limiting rest than gold/expendable resources. All that meant was that you quick-saved before every rest and reloaded if you got ambushed. It was dumb. It was doubly dumb in BG and IWD (versus BG2 and IWD2) because many ambushes were nowhere near balanced for even a partially resource-expended level 1-2 party so if you didn't reload you would probably be game over-ed anyway. (Same thing with ambushes when going from map to map.) In other words, save scumming. It's basically cheating, you don't need to do it, and most games are vulnerable to it in some form or another. I already mentioned the balance issue.