Boeroer

In general this can work well. Only the modal of Quarterstaff doesn't stack with the usual deflection buffs like Mirrored Images. Chromoprismatic Staff comes a bit late, but before that you can use the Spine of Thicket Green which has a nice enchantment for Restoration spells.

I don't doubt that you have those problems. Deadfire IS heavy on the CPU - I just don't experience that magnitude of heating-up (and the game runs pretty nicely for me, too).

Wael is really good on the defensive side though. No (desperate) need for thick armor or/and shield if you can have some quick Mirrored Images. That can make you cast faster (less armor recovery) and more precisely (no ACC malus from shield).

It's like saying that the Witcher has a truly nice beard in the third part and judging by all the people who bought Witcher3 that must be the reason for its success. Could be totally unrelated. Even if the beard is superdandily nice (which seems to be debatable) this doesn't mean that it's a prominent reason to buy the game. You have a theory but no data to back it up - like most theories we might come up with in this case.

When you sail around you can see those coordinates change on the map - as you said. 8 degrees 4 minutes south and 56 degrees 56 minutes east is you goal. If you sail north you will see the first number (south) decrease, if you sail south it will increase. Same with west/east. What exactly is unclear?

My CPU is about the same as yours iirc - I have no such problems.

Ohhhhh - you didn't read the BG3 forums it seems.

I'm pretty sure Deadfire's non-success was a big disappointment for him. And who knows what followed after that (in the office). I guess nobody was happy about it... He even wrote on Twitter (today) that two years ago two big disappointments happened (and another one last year) - and that those prevent him from being truly enthusiastic and happy about anything nowadays. He didn't explicitly say it but I presume one of it was Deadfire (since the release was in May 2018). It's kind of weird because Deadfire still has good reviews and most people who played it do like it. It's one of my most beloved games of all times - but of course that's not much comfort for him. I also only bought it once - like everybody else.

No, no consumables besides food. It's not because I want a bigger challenge - I just don't like using them because it adds another layer of micromanagement in addition to active abilites and the rest of combat. Oh, I forgot unguents - those I do use if I have to pass a tight skill check in scripted scenes or if I have to pick a difficult lock or so. But they are mostly non-combat related and that's fine. And if I play a Nalpasca then I use drugs obviously because it wouldn't work without. Yes. The only time I didn't play PotD was my first run in PoE1 which was done on "normal" - which I shelved rel. early because I learned so much about the mechanics during that half-run that I wanted to try something else (and with a bigger challenge). Looking at the hours I put into both games that might be the case.

Unity3D games seem to be heavy on the CPU in any case (I mean if you look at the visial quality you get for that). NWN2 wasn't made with Unity of course, but POE and Deadfire were.

Yes, but what I meant was that if something competes with your game which already uses a small niche (and/or disappoints with the first installment and/or has bad marketing and/or has a setting that rubs players the wrong way and/or fed the nostalgia too much with a prequel) then you will sell very few copies.

As several people now did with your assessment of the Witcher games in that regard.

As I already said Microsoft is eager to fill its Game Pass portfolio. So maybe we will see some smaller Pillars/Eora games. Josh is still working on the TTRPG rules (part time at work) and he would like to do a Pillars Tactics game - so maybe there's enough material and motivation to make something smaller but likeable for Game Pass. And as I also said in previous posts Feargus is (or at least was) eager to make a Skyrim in Eora which is even more likely to happen now after the success of the Outer Worlds (even would use the same Unreal engine I presume so there's a foundation to build on). But PoE3... like a real sequel in more than the name... the more I listen to Josh and the more I learn about the figures of Deadfire sales the more I think it's not going to happen.

Small addition: some of the "non-subclass-related" offensive spells of Priests target the Will defense (e.g. Divine Mark, Shining Beacon etc.) which is rather unusual. Luckily it's pretty easy to reduce Will on enemies: club + modal (-25 directly), Miasma of Dull-Mindedness (-40 via RES/INT debuff) and Dazzling Lights (-10 directly, doesn't stack with club) for example do send Will down the drain pretty fast so that your Priest can then apply some good hits/crits with his a Shining Beacon. The other offensive ones often target Reflex which is also rel. easy to debuff (also with Miasma for example). So Wizard + Priest go together quite well in a party in general. Will and Reflex are often not as high as Fortitude on enemies. If you have a Furyshaper in the party then you want to pick Withdraw as a Priest: you can withdraw the ward which makes it invulnerable but it will still work its magic. You an even use it to block chokepoints that way etc. You see how some circumstancial spells can become quite important if paired with the right party members and their abilities. Death Godlikes and Streetfighters for example like Barring Death's Door + Salvation of Time.

Yes, especially CRPGs with a good amount of writing and sophisticated mechanics usually take a lot of time to get into, play and finish. If there are several contenders at the same time they can hurt each other really badly because of that. It's not like Candy Crush vs. Solitaire (in terms of players investment of time and energy).

You must have misread my whole post then because I don't think that this was an issue at all. As I said it's very easy to dive into Deadfire even if you haven't played PoE1. I don't think writing the watcher story further had any significant impact on the sales numbers. You start as lvl 1 (with new race and class if you wish) anyways. It's not as if PoE is a gate to Deadfire and you can't understand or play it without playing PoE first. D:OS II is turn based, multiplayer and 3D. It's also very different in tone and overall appereance and writing (quality and amount). Swen Vinke told Josh Sawyer that surveys show that both games have an overlapping audience of only 40%. Both are CRPGs so you would suspect it's bigger - but no. I presume the numbers would be similar if you try to find out the overlap of Skyrim/PoE players. The target audience of single player RTwP party pased isometric RPGs is just very, very small. PoE had big success as a crowdfunding campaign and got a lot of exposure that way. So it did fairly well given the expectations and the dire situation Obsidian was in.

It's not surprising if you take into account that Microsoft wants a broad portfolio of smaller games for their Game Pass program. That's the main reason why they aquired so many smaller development studios in the near past. Grounded was a "pet" project of some devs which was initially greenlighted by Feargus (iirc) even before Microsoft took over. It's a small team which also means small(ish) budget. So it fits the Game Pass quite well I think. Maybe that was a reason why Microsoft also said: yeah go for it. Crowd funding seems to be out now that Microsoft can provide lots of funding. Also going back to Kickstarter even without Microsoft would have been very unlikely because Feargus is one of the board members of Fig.

All "pure" casteres have longish casting times in general. Priest is no exception. They seem to be quite long but since the whole combat got slowed down compared to PoE it's actually not that bad. E.g. the recovery of normal weapon attacks is also a lot longer now. Priest is still one of the most impactful classes in Deadfire, especially when going with a party. The fact that nearly every official Ultimate playthrough so far was done with a (multiclass) Priest should give you a hint that they can't be that bad. The only problem with Priests is that you are not as flexible with your casting portfolio as a Wizard is (because he has grimoires, Priests do not). You will not gain all spells at level-up as in PoE but will have to pick a few. That means you have to pick well. Usually there are a few spells per tier which are really good, some that are circumstancially good and some which are strictly inferior. Stuff like Devotions for the Faithful you might always want to pick for example. In general there is not that much "building" with a SC Priest because the choices are rather limited but you have plenty of ability points. So eventually you are taking stuff you don't really need just because you have to pick something. So not very complicated after all. The biggest decision is indeed to pick the deity since that gives you access to certain spells you can't have if you pick another god. The different subclasses tend to different roles. e.g. a Priest of Eothas leans towards Protection and Restoration while a Priest of Magran is more about Punishment. Skaen is more like the Assassin of Priests and so on. The most unique one is Prist of Woedica I would say (has the most unique spells nobody else gets). Berath can be a good mix of support and damage dealing. But I'd take a look at the subclasses and then decide what I like best: https://pillarsofeternity2.wiki.fextralife.com/Priest

I also think that markting/exposure/attention takes a big part - and I personally blame the move from Kickstarter to Fig for that. But I think the multiplayer option is a bigger point than I thought it was.

Yes, Deadfire doesn't take the rather lame power-fantasy approach to simply give you Riddonculou's Staff of Sheer Awesomeness which makes all other weapons obsolete - but instead Deadfire tries to offer unique but balanced items. So that every character you come up with might find a useful and cool item that doesn't make you regret you skilled for (or like) something else. If you played Icewind Dale and didn't skill for specific weapons you'd regret it. This usually doesn't happen in Deafire. Also not every unique weapon you find has to be a strict improvement to stuff you already own. It's a different approach than the old Infinity Engine games. So if your Wizard finds Voidwheel he might think "eh?" - but he might like the Chromoprismatic Staff he finds later because of the Power Level bonus. And he might outright love Engoliero do Espirs once he finds out that Blade Feast procs on every kill (not only the ones done with the weapon itself but also kills from spells...).

BG3 takes place over 100 years after BG2. It also doesn't use the Bhaalspawn storyline at all, only references it. I don't think the continuation of the Watcher story had any effect on the sales numbers. They could have made a similar game but with a new protagonist and it would have sold equally bad. In Deadfire you don't really need to have played PoE1. You reroll your char anyway, you can just pick a background to simulate PoE1 and off you go. I'm following Josh Sawyers Twitch streams and so far the devs suspect the following reasons for the low sales numbers: poor marketing move from Kickstarter to Fig RTwP is not very popular atm unpopular/non-traditional setting no multiplayer nostalgia needs were sated/increased competition in that small party-based, isometric RPG niche several issues with the game itself, like difficulty, reputation system, import failures, ship combat, not well perceived main story Remember that PoE had very good reviews and user scores despite its quirks. Stuff like initial bugs and performance problems can be a problem - but those can't explain the massive sales drop compared to PoE (which had similar problems at the start - like many games). Older games of Obsdian had those problems as well and so do other games. Yet they are doing fine (see Pathfinder). Also for almost all RPGs it's normal that a huge percentage of players doesn't finish. D:OS I and II are no exception but sold tremendously better. The sequel even sold better than the first installment. Atm I think multiplayer is a bigger factor than I though it would be. I'm follwing the development of Death Trash atm. The developer is very active on Twitter. It's astonishing how many Twitter users ask if it will come with multiplayer options. That's the feature that's requested the most by far. Since I don't care for that at all I might have a blind spot there.

First of all: D&D is silly. Secondly: your tone is aggressive and you are overexaggerating - both will not help you to get reasonable answers. But maybe that's not what you were looking for in the first place. I'll try nonetheless: You're complaining about one of the weapons with the highest per-hit damage potential in the game. The Necrotic Lance that Voidwheel casts on enemies profits from all the dmg bonuses that a normal sword hit would also get (including the Legendary 60% but also Sneak Attack, Deathblows, you name it). So it's often one-shotting enemies once it procs (and that's like every 5th attack when fully enchanted). That damage doesn't count towards the self damage, also the lashes of the sword don't. It's only 10% of the physical damage roll. All in all the self damage isn't really that much of a problem if you have access to any healing - it's no problem at all if you are a Steel Garrote or have a Chanter with Old Siec (drains more life from every hit than Voidwheel's self damage). It's especially devastating with an Assassin/whatever because the Necrotic Lance will also get the Backstab- and Assassinate bonus if it procs. Getting healed for 15 while only receiving 10% of the physical damage is okay if you one-shot a lot. Also there are classes that can profit from the self damage (see Monks - they can generate wounds without getting hit which enables them to spam abilites like Torment's Reach) or just shrug it off (Paladins, Chanters, Heralds). A Steel Garrote/Monk with Swift Flurry/Hearbeat Drumming is especially interesting. The 15 health on kill do scale with MIG and other healing bonuses by the way. It's not a great weapon for everybody - like your friendly Helwalker/Assassin or 3CON-Bloodmage from your neighborhood might die if they use it without the supervision of an adult healer. But it is a unique and powerful weapon nonetheless. Saying that there no weapons that are powerful or even useful in Deadfire is as (unknowingly?) ignorant. You simply don't know where to look it seems. There are plenty of items that completely break the game balance if you combine them with the right things. Ever tried Grave Calling with Chilling Grave on a Beckoner/Berserker? Engoliero do Espirs with Blade Feast on a Soulblade/Rogue or an Evoker? Detro's Cage Helmet on a Helwalker/Bloodmage or Warlock? Did you try Whispers of the Wind with Hand Mortar & Fire in the Hole? Or both weapons with a single class Stormspeaker? I guess the answer is no. What you could be angry about are the obscure descriptions that don't let you grasp what a uniqe items' effects really do. One has to test everything in order to find out what the descriptiuons really mean in game. So I would call the tooltips and descriptions of Deadfire a failure - but not the items (or who made them) themselves.

Do don't need to optimize you characters for PotD either. The game mechanics and the content are pretty well balanced and the attributes don't have a colossal impact on the effectiveness of characters in general (there are exceptions of course). A fair amount of meta-knowledge and/or good understanding of the underlying mechanics is what makes the game more easy than some optimized stats. As long as you don't wilfully gimp your chars you will be ok - if you know what you are doing. New players ususally can't know that (although I started into Deadfire on PotD and is was fine - that was at realease though where it was significantly easier than nowadays). I'm currently playing a SC Furyshaper with Edér (MC Swashbuckler), Aloth (SC Wizard), Xoti (SC Harvester of Gaun) and Tekehu (SC Stormcaller). They are all not really optimized for anything (except the Furyshaper who's optimized for Barbaric Retalition - which means he wasn't optimized for 90% of the game before getting that) and it was a breeze again. I don't even use consumables besides resting food (but mostly the cheap standard stuff like Silverfin and Pork Meat - food you pick up everywhere randomly). So tl;dr: no optimized chars, no figurines, no scrolls, no potions, no problems. No need to worry. And if it feels too hard and is no fun: you can always tune down the difficulty, no shame in that.

They are tagged as illusions. Wael's Eye and Whitewitch Mask both raise their Power Level.

If it hadn't such a long recovery phase. It's nice on a tank who's standing there, holding enemies and somebody else is casting nukes though.