the streaker

Eothas keeps talking about revealing the gods' true nature, but he hasn't really done any of that, has he? Destroying the wheel won't prove to anyone what the gods really are, nor will the gods be compelled to reveal their true nature in order to get kith to cooperate. If anything, the gods will most likely continue being themselves and steer kith towards rebuilding the wheel the way the Engwithans wanted it. The only way this would have made sense would be if Eothas personally marched to every part of Eora and shouted out "the gods aren't real!"

The game is huge, and it's great. Loved the gameplay, the politics between the factions and within the factions, etc. The novel-style "cutscenes" and the dialogue were also quite interesting. However I just could not get into the main plot. - Why am I following Eothas and why do I need my soul back? I did not understand the motivation behind the watcher chasing Eothas. No idea which part of my soul was missing and when/if I got it back. - What the heck are the implications of "destroying the Wheel"? The Engwithans created all of this, so obviously people have survived and grown prior to the wheel and the fabricated gods. Why will people suffer if the Wheel is broken and why would people need to adapt? Unfortunately these two questions did not get answered thoroughly enough for me, so I never really got into the main story.

I just finished a playthrough where I sided with Aedyls (Principi) and Maya stayed, even shot her former boss in Ukaizo.

Maia is such a beast, most damage by far for me.

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.

Why is that a problem and since when does nobody like a rest-heavy character? D&D became famous partly on the back of powerful wizards, sorcerers and priests with a limited number of uses before resting. The balance was the DM, which would equate to the game designer in cRPGs. There's nothing wrong with having diversity between the classes. How boring is it that every class in PoE2 has all per-encounter spells, an arbitrary expendable resource (rogues run out of "guile" as the battle goes on? barbs run out of rage? what??), an an arbitrary "empower" button that magically makes everything stronger?

This thread's premise is just so silly. What could someone have against the game being tweaked to provide more of a challenge? If they modify the balance to the point where you're not enjoying your time on normal/hard, you can always turn the game down to easy/normal and your superiority over the monsters is probably restored. Meanwhile the guy who is hardcore into this game and wants a harder challenge on PotD doesn't have the option of turning the difficulty to PotD+.

Holy ****, Eder died?! I thought I'd see him shipwrecked on some island eventually... now I'm level 11 and having my doubts, and then I read this! RIP good man. If I realized, I'd have reloaded the first fight tbh.

Agreed. It's easy to nitpick because the game is so large in scope, but overall it is a very fun game.

If you spend some time off the beaten path in the real-life Caribbean, you'll find all kinds of kriol dialects that incorporate aspects of different languages into English. Belizeans, for example, have a widely spoken dialect that incorporates words and phonologies from indigenous Miskito and west African languages. Granted, Deadfire doesn't make a real attempt at kriol, but the mishmashing of different languages is actually fairly consistent with real world colonial settings. Hawaiian-American culture is possibly a better example - they generally speak standard English but may still use native terms like "Aloha" and "Mahalo" in everyday speech. Real world examples aside, it adds flavor and helps characterize the cultural differences between the various factions and cultures in the game. The Huana's "Ekera" and "I say" seem to indicate objective emphasis (German Rhinelanders do the same thing with the word "genau"), while Valian expressions are often passionate/emotional signifiers and exclamations. It's a subtle nod to the character of each faction and is more nuanced and artful than players give it credit for, imo. It's not nuanced and artful at all, though. 99% of the time, the formula is "hyperlinked foreign exclamation! Perfectly spoken English language sentence." Non-native English speakers that are fluent in English generally don't throw in random native language words in the mix... if they do, it's because they can't think of the English word for it, so they will use the two languages interchangeably in a sentence. At least half the races in Deadfire are based on real world colonial powers (i.e. Europeans) and this is not how Europeans speak English.

Totally agreed. What a waste... 75% of the hyperlink text seemed to do nothing other than explain what some foreign exclamation meant. The whole foreign word thing was poorly done as well, everyone just inserts a "gallarde" or "ekara" or whatever at the start of the conversation, then it's back to English, with few exceptions. Who talks like this???

Ah this crap again? PoE 1 was such a pain in the ass to figure out attack speeds and modifiers, and a bunch of bugs to go along with it. The devs never even chimed in to clear up how things actually work. They haven't changed anything in PoE 2. Why not make a simple intuitive system and make it transparent so that people can get on with making character builds instead of counting frames and making spreadsheets? Sigh.

Sloppy writing. I believe it damaged allies in the first game as well, so I assume this is intentional.

I actually think this is something PoE 1 and 2 missed. It made resting/backtracking to inns trivial in the first game, and was removed entirely in the second. But if there was a real danger to traveling in a tired/weakened state, it would make management of party and camping supplies a lot more important.

Was a solution to the "tedium" of resting not already figured out in the old infinity engine games, to an extent? Resting and traveling are dangerous, you can get ambushed, so it's not a simple matter of resting all over the place to recharge all your abilities. The danger posted by resting and traveling could be tweaked to make you think twice about blowing all of your per-rest abilities in a dungeon, exhausting your characters, and then rolling the dice on a lucky uninterrupted rest to bring you back up to full strength. This is a gameplay feature. In PoE 1, it wasn't much of a feature because, like has been already said, resting and traveling carried zero risk. In PoE 2, they decided to remedy this by making resting practically unnecessary? Fair enough, but then you have to balance the fights so that each fight has a very high degree of challenge even assuming the player uses all his abilities. I don't follow OP's reasoning on why this will be tedious. As long as the player doesn't have so many abilities that it becomes tedious to click a million skills a million times. Really, I prefer the rest mechanic but well balanced to include real danger to letting yourself become too weak before resting. But balancing the encounters and limiting the number of abilities is also acceptable.

So hard to choose best RPGs, like asking someone to choose the best song or best movie... it depends so much on personal taste, and they're so different. My top ten in no particular order would be: BG 2+TOB, Fallout 1/2, Mass Effect 2/3, Dragon Age Origins, Knights of the Old Republic saga, Icewind Dale II, A few of the Neverwinter Nights games (MotB), PS:T, Dungeon Siege 1, and last but not least Pillars. Honorable mention to Morrowind, Diablo 2, Guild Wars, and maybe a few others that I'm forgetting.

You don't understand - a full party can go hours without having to rest and backtrack. Compared to that, solo is in fact tons of resting. Supplies are pretty well distributed in the white march expansions, but not so in the main content. Chanter and paladin notwithstanding, of course. Those classes are incredibly boring but also resilient as a result.

PotD solo... god, do you have a rough idea of what percentage of your time is spent backtracking and on loading screens back to Caed Nua to rest? I think I'd lose my sanity.

The enemy's aggression typically goes on the first & closest character they see, so just send in your monk first and you should never be lacking wounds. Then buff the monk up with decent armor and spells, and you should be good to go. On my last run, my monk topped the party in total damage done, very impressive class. For the rogue, if you're having trouble keeping them alive, best bet is to use a pike and hit from behind the front line.

No class is truly necessary, as long as you compensate in another way. Combat is a balance of your defenses vs. the enemy's accuracy, and vice versa. If you can't buff one, debuff the other. There are a million debuffs a wizard, druid or cipher can inflict on a group of enemies. Also there are scrolls that hard-counter certain afflictions, and of course the cheap +defense scroll. A priest just makes it a bit easier.

Yeah but with a little bit of stealth, you can get nice and close enough to launch a mid-range spell before anyone moves and screws up your placement. Unless another level of survival is some major breakpoint, it's far more strategically valuable to be able to stealth a bit (3-4).

I'm a bit torn about reaping knives. On most targets you don't get significantly higher damage output, and it takes a long while for reaping knives to return the 80 focus spent on reaping knives, and then to actually generate enough additional focus to make the whole thing worthwhile. Feels a bit like the fight outcome is already decided by the time that happens, and maybe that's not a good thing because I delayed mindweb or amplified wave for so long.

Defensive mindweb is where it's at with late game ciphers. The synergy with a defensive paladin (or other tanky character) and priest/scroll buffs is insane. I've actually subbed out my priest because he's overkill on anything but the most difficult fights. You can do some crazy things with wizard and all his +deflection buffs, too. Defensive mindweb is my second favourite defense after priests.

Yes, IIRC grieving mother can also read into the artifact, as can your PC if you're cipher.

Yeah, no doubt it pays to be able to skip recovery entirely, but I think it's an exploit (one that likely won't be fixed at this point, since it's been known for literally years), so probably not a good idea to consider for class balance purposes.