Mygaffer

I'd like to see half-races. Half-Elf, half-Orlan, etc.

I really hope they rework a lot of how suppression works for Deadfire, I always feel stymied at how many things suppress each other in this game.

I am on the third floor of the endless paths and fighting the Ogres and Ogre Druids that are found there. I've hit and crit with dominate on both the Ogres and the Ogre Druids, the effect lasts for all of a fraction of a second and then they lose the dominate effect. I'm using Puppet Master with Grieving Mother. It's really frustrating in what is proving to be a difficult fight. I'm on the latest patch. Thanks.

I am on the third floor of the endless paths and fighting the Ogres and Ogre Druids that are found there. I've hit and crit with dominate on both the Ogres and the Ogre Druids, the effect lasts for all of a fraction of a second and then they lose the dominate effect. It's really frustrating in what is proving to be a difficult fight. I'm on the latest patch. Is there a fix incoming for this? Or something going on I'm not catching? Thanks.

Oh my god I'm having the exact same problem! I'm landing hit and crit domination with Grieving Mother and the effect lasts a fraction of a second. It is beyond frustrating right now.

I'm curious what your thoughts on this are now, assuming you've played more of the game. Have you figured out how to control the crowds yet?

But that's from April 2015. I thought they changed that because it was so lackluster. I think I will ahve to look into the files myself. This is an old post but there is a tweet where J Sawyer confirms he changed it to 25%.

I know this is an old post but the best defense by far to this is to have a Paladin in the party with Aegis of Loyalty. The Paladin merely strikes the effected companion and it dispels the effect while doing reduced damage.

I wish to know this as well.

"Waste time?" Making your own builds is half the fun of the game!

Monks can be one of the best pure DPS classes out there, with plenty of control options and you throw them at the bottom of the pack. If I were a sport's media talking head I'd be throwing around words like "disgraceful, disgusting, ridiculous." Monks are top tier in my opinion. I'm at work or else I'd link you to my build, but my monk literally walks up to enemies, hits 'em with a stun, and then punches the hell out of them until they explode. Max dex, high strength, with main monk talent and gear and lighting strikes my monk literally will sit there hitting for 70+ damage more than once per second.

Early game you can't buy everything you want. The primary reason for this is you'll be investing in your keep and magic items are typically very expensive, with the less expensive stuff still being around 3k to 4k pands and the more desirable stuff like extra spell rings and weapons like Borresaine being around 10k+. I typically only buy the less expensive upgrades in the keep in the early game and only buy key pieces of equipment. I then have all the money I need for things like rest bonuses, consumables, crafting materials, etc. As time goes on money will stop being a problem. If you clear Readric's keep with a "kill 'em all" mentality then you'll clear tens of thousands of pands. Not all characters will want to complete that quest that way though. Basically the economy was pretty well balanced in this game, you can't just buy whatever willy nilly and not expect to run out of money, at least if you are upgrading your keep. Even late game when you're rolling in money if you try and buy every single magic item you can go broke.

I typically do several quests without picking up anyone, then when I start to run into a little bit of a brick wall (I play on PotD) I will pick up Eder, Aloth and Durance, and then keep playing until around level 6 or so when I finally pick up a couple others, like Kana, Hiravias, and/or Grieving Mother. You get more individual XP with fewer people and the people you recruit are the same level you are when you recruit them. So you can ahead of the game a little this way, which on PotD helps, but of course on lower difficulties is just not necessary. So I guess really it all depends on what you are trying to accomplish with your play through.

Here is the problem with your outlook and why PoE 2 will not have any "broken" skills, class combos, or items. When you have one or two weapons that are far and away the obvious "best weapons" then the majority of players will use those weapons. Josh Sawyer as a designer is all about player choice. That means you have a lot of viable classes, class combos, items, skills, etc. It means if you have a concept for a character chances are it will be at least playable. It means you don't have a large variance in power level, maybe at the very most 10-15%, but often even less. They also balance around normal and hard, as that is where most players will be playing. So you won't "face-roll dragons with broken weapons" in PoE 2. If not having a broken game is such a turn off this series is probably not for you. Hell, no Josh Sawyer CRPG is probably for you. Personally overall I'm very much in favor of balance. On the topic of the unlabored blade, I hadn't unlocked it prior to the nerf anyway but I will say I can literally only remember it going off once even though the Devil of Caroc is using it all the time in her off hand. It does feel like the proc percentage is too low but the Devil is still doing real work on enemies swinging Nightshrowd in her primary hand and the unlabored blade in the other. I think they've heard the complaints about itemization and have some ideas to make that part of progression feel more meaningful over the course of Deadfire. We've already seen huge leaps from the launch of PoE until the latest patch. Simple things like coloring the unique items yellow make a difference, along with the White March adding more interesting items through the stronghold adventures and the soulbound items. They've already discussed some of the changes they'll make in Deadfire, how you'll be finding more powerful items as you progress, and how there will be some random loot, although none of the major loot will be randomized. Pillars was a great first effort at bringing this kind of game into the modern era but Obsidian knows there were some design flaws and what is promising to me is that they've acknowledged just about all the design flaws that the community has talked about. So don't count on broken items or a broken game, you won't get it. You might just get a game with a real sense of progression and player choice though and isn't that really better?

Are we sure that an NPC falling in combat is a requirement to gain an injury? I only ask because it isn't that way in Tyranny. You only had to lose a good bit of health. That said, it not requiring falling in combat made it a bit muddled and confusing in tyranny. So, I hope it does require losing all health to gain the injury status. Anyway... I like the old system, but I am neither here nor there about the change. I personally think an injury system will likely be just as confusing to the players that had issue with the health/endurance system. I guess we will see. Josh said in one of the livestreams that yes, the new injury system would require characters to be knocked out a lot more often. The good thing is that he said they haven't committed to this system, it is just something they are playing with. What's wrong with failure? failure is interesting and can lead to new emergent and unique situations. I love jagged alliance 2 mainly because of its combat but one of my fondest memories was tackling a difficult mission without a star merc who took another contract because I hesitated to re-up him. Failure on my part sure, and I really wanted him on the mission but my ragtag scrubs pulled it off and turned something routine into an under-dog triumph of bigly proportions. Failure and defeat make for superb drama and excitement, success stretched any longer than momentary is tedious - Veni, Vidi, Vici. Now what Julius, nice cup of tea? yawn. Well it's not actually a failure state. Like in Torment when you fail an attempt at an action it can still result in an interesting outcome. So I'll continue with it. A knockout injury isn't actually a failure in game, you just win the fight with your other characters and continue with the injuries. It feels like a failure, at least for a lot of players, which is where the design flaw comes in. In the Torment system I mentioned failing your skill attempt or conversation attempt doesn't actually feel like a failure because you are still seeing an interesting outcome to your actions. I don't want them to get rid of the existing injury system, I think it can give you an interesting choice to make when you just eek out a win in a tough fight, do you want to reload and try to get less knockout injuries, knowing it is a really tough fight, do you want to use one of your camping supplies to rest, or do you want to push through a few more encounters first. What I don't want is for that to become the health system, when I really like the endurance/health system and the "this encounter/multiple encounter" management of health it brings.

OK, so Josh has said they're playing around with the idea of a new health system centered around injuries. I hate this idea. Why? First of all I hate having characters knocked out. It feels like failure to me. I almost always reload when it happens. Second, I hate playing with negative status effects. Swollen eye? -2 perception. I'm trying to build my character to get the most effectiveness out of them and now my rogue or ranger is less effective. Is the overall effect huge? No. But it feels disproportionately punishing to the player because they've been doing everything they can to max out this character and now some of that is undone. This is one of those times where a designer thinks, "-2 perception isn't too big a debuff, players won't mind" while players will think, "this totally negates my Helmet of Darksee/resting bonus, how lame." Third of all I really liked the endurance/health system. It makes you manage your endurance throughout a combat, meaning you have to be careful not to take multiple big hits, you have to have ways to restore some endurance, but if you do then you can continue to fight because you have a much larger health pool. While you are managing endurance throughout the combat you are managing the health over the course of several combat encounters. It is a really good system. So I'm totally on board with all the other changes but not this one. Why take a great system that works well and throw it away in favor of a system that I have to believe a lot of players will end up hating. I know the players who want to rest anywhere, anytime will hate it. I know the players who liked the existing system will hate it. And I really know the people who hate to have their characters knocked out will hate it. I hope the design team thinks long and hard before throwing away a really good system to put in something completely off the wall that won't feel good to players. That's my one complaint. EDIT: To be clear I don't want the injuries to go away. Especially on PotD where I might have just got through a battle I won't necessarily reload because I got knocked out. I just don't want injuries to replace the endurance/health system.

I will say that I deeply *hate* the idea of an injury based health system. First of all I really like the endurance/health mechanic. It was a great mechanic that balanced short term and long term health management. I also am one of those players who almost always reloads if one of my characters even gets knocked out in battle, which doesn't happen very often. I hate that a character got knocked out, it feels like failure. But of course for the injury system to work characters are going to have to get knocked out a lot more. Out of all the things I've heard about the design changes for Deadfire this is the only one that has me gritting my teeth. Not only do I hate the idea of characters being knocked out, not only do I hate the idea of playing with negative effects on my characters, but I also thought the existing system was a really good one, and to see a really good system get thrown out for one that seems onerous and punishing to the player... well it doesn't excite me.

Balancing will be a much tougher task with true multi-classing but Josh "Balancer" Sawyer is surely up the challenge. Monk/Barbarian, with crazy unarmed damage hitting multiple enemies around me? And I want to be surrounded by enemies to stack wounds? If I multi-class I'm thinking Monk/Rogue to be a kind of Eora analogue to the Hashashin with great single target damage, or that monk/barbarian, with carnage and berserker rage to deal damage in the middle of a group of enemies.

You get high on whiteleaf and put the baby in the oven and the chicken in the baby seat. OH MY GOD WHAT HAVE I DONE?!?!

I think people are too quick to assume something is going to be horrible or totally distort the game they loved into something unrecognizable. I think this team has earned our trust. To me the darker material becomes much more effective when contrasted against lighter moments. There is this idea in game design of pacing, and that encompasses a lot of things. If quest after quest is darker than the last, i.e. an animancers little wicht of a hollowborn daughter is let out of a locked trunk and tears his throat out, a women fearful of giving birth to a hollowborn baby finds out the medicine that will cure it doesn't do anything of the sort, that the local lord has murdered his wife and child, and that a dude who is a ghost of his former self decides to keep his dead lovers soul trapped in an adra necklace because he can't let go, well that drains people. You have to have some lighter stuff thrown in there to give players a little respite and variety. Deadfire isn't going to all of a sudden turn into Lunar: Silver Star Story (which was still an awesome and hilarious game) because a few more humorous lines and situations are thrown into the game. If anything it will accentuate the darker and more serious tone the original set in place. Giving the game some more lighthearted bits here and there was definitely a much needed thing. The real world isn't dark and grim all the time. I don't know about the rest of you but I joke and laugh just about every day. It's a normal part of life and how people interact. I'm glad we'll see a little more of that in Deadfire. So don't worry about a huge tonal shift, one isn't coming. We'll just have some more moments that are lighthearted and it will actually make the darker stuff that much more effective. Not surprising since Feargus was one of the primary culprits in establishing the over the top tone and going overboard with pop culture references in FO2. Then again, he doesn't really have that much influence for Deadfire's writing. Sawyer likes to keep things grounded and he didn't appreciate some of the more whimsical characters from BG. Hey, I'm back.

Actually spells are getting more powerful. They will be balanced out through casting time and if they are interrupted they fizzle and you have to start again. To compensate for the increased time you can now re-target right before the cast actually goes off. It will not only solve all the issues around per rest spells but wizard players complained about spells not being powerful enough, now that will remedied. I think we've got to have to some trust in this team, Pillars was a great first effort and these dudes are really smart and knowledgeable about design, we're going to like what they do. I wouldn't say that about any dev, cough*Bethesda*cough.

Some people are just no fun. Whatever anime trope bull**** someone wants to attach to the character Ydwin won't effect how the character is written. I feel some of you forget what the relationships were like in Baldur's Gate 2, you had all kinds of ways to interact with your followers.

Woah, you mean PoE collected a further $1m *after* the Kickstarter campaign through Paypal? That's awesome and something I didn't know. While this game definitely saw less traditional backers, by about half, even if the PayPal backers back at about half the rate that gets us damn close. I love the portrait of Ydwin they showed and I'd love for my female Orlan monk to have a go at a personal relationship with her if possible so fingers crossed. I also find fishing in games to be a kind of guilty pleasure, from Torchlight 2 to Stardew Valley to Breath of Fire, I always like playing the fisherman in my RPGs. EDIT: Also us backers can certainly talk to interested friends and family and internet communities to let people who might be interested in backing but didn't know about the game to come and be a slacker backer. It can't hurt.

So I know this is an older post but I've just tested Heart of the Storm with Sagani and Stormcaller and Heart of the Storm does nothing to Stormcaller's damage. Have you tested this yourself?

You sure like your :hmmm: icon a lot.