Boeroer

Iirc the majority of PoE players who took part in the survey (after PoE and DLCs got released) wished for Aedyr or the Living Lands as place for a sequel. I think it was in that survey but maybe there was another one. Whatever... Same result in a poll we had here in the forums. Old Vailia was also among the more popular votes I believe. Not much is known about the Living Lands (seems to be a bit on the "jurassic" side - humongous beasts and plants and stuff), but it seems that all of them would have been a more classic setting than the Deadfire Archipelago is. Now I like the Deadfire Archipelago. I think Obsidian did a great job with the history, lore and worldbuilding. But if you had asked me before how I feel about the Deadfie Archipelago as setting for PoE2 I would most likely have said "meh". Man I really hope we will see some other games in the PoE universe. That world has grown on me.

I also didn't play Turn Based Mode but judging from what I read all the action speed and recovery buffs seem to be a lot less important than in RTwP Mode. Single Class Barbarian with late game Driving Roar is very potent. But I don't know if that's the type of Barbarian OP wants to play (Barb with axes and so on). Barbaric Retaliation is pretty nice with axes + modal (Bleeding Cuts). A Barb multiclass I particularly like is Barb/Monk. Especially Berserker/Monk since the Berserker Frenzy fuels the Monk's wounds and Swift Flurry triggers quite often esp. with Barbaric Smash. Bleeding Cuts get applied by Swift Flurries as well iirc. I you like 2handers better I'd vote for a Berserker/Monk with a Morning Star. It's the perfect synergy of class(es) and weapon. Barb/Streetfighter is also nice as dps character. Even though the recovery bonus isn't so important in this case but the increased Sneak Attack dmg and the high crit chance + hit/crit damage when bloodied.

Of course the game has its problems. It's just not easy to determine if what you identify as a problem is a problem for (so many) other players which then results in a massive sales drop of more than 500k copies. 10k reviews of 1,000k sold copies is a good sample size. If the problems you identified annoyed as many players as you said then you would see that. I think it is very unlikely that a game that has problems which annoy and put off like 500k players would have a user score about 8.3 on Metacritic. Just because you made some observations, analyzed your problems with the game meticulously and phrased it nicely doesn't mean that a big bunch of other players felt the same. Of course you will find players who feel the same. But enough to explain such a sales disaster? I still don't think so. And where is the evidence that you mentioned? You found it amusing that posters said that it might be the setting which put potential players off. There's nothing amusing about it. It makes sense. One can't prove it without a big survey but it is not a far-fetched assumption. It is more likely that a) many players see a setting/theme and decide that they will not buy the game than b) an equal amount of players watch streams, read critics on Kotaku etc. and then decide to not buy. I mean both can happen and most likely did happen and it would add up. It's not either/or. I just think that a) plays a bigger role since it takes nearly no time and no other investment than a glance to make that decision - while for b) you'd have to invest quite some time and motivation to do so. That's why I think there was no cause for amusement. If you would have said something along the lines of "What I also think played a role was..." I would most likely have agreed. But your "Setting? Lulz! It is my theory alone which really explains it all" approach prevented that.

I use Kana as Dragon Thrashed tank most of times. Not as the main tank though. Some things to consider (just pointing out generally): Chanters get +12 ACC on their offensive chants (like Dragon Thrashed) when using a single one handed weapon. When withdrawn they keep on chanting. A Chanter with a Preservation shield and another Preservation item gets +100 to all defenses when withdrawn. You can use this for Defensive Mindweb. If I have a Priest in the party I often use this to create an invisible chanting "totem" with high ACC and invulnerability. I will take Withdrawn as spell mastery then. White Worms: sometimes enemies will leave no body if you kill them with a crit. That's the case when the "gib" option is turned on in the game options menu. It gibs enemies' corpses. If you plan to use White Worms you should turn that off. In my opinion it's ridiculous anyway. Also corpses can explode over and over again (if you reload they are gone though). Because of this behavior White Worms is one of the most powerful tools to clear out maps with lots of enemies (like Raedric's Castle). You can lure them to a spot over and over again - and the more bodies pile up the quicker they die. This way I can kill Raedric very early and clear out his whole castle which gives me a lot of money from loot (esp. from plate armors).

Effort: raw lash is good - but it doesn't stack like Bleeding Cuts do. Therefore not as good as it seems. During multiple tests with several two handed weapons on several different chars it didn't perform too well (e.g. compared to Willbreaker, Oathbreaker, Amra etc.). It's my go-to weapon for a Vengeful-Defeat Barb and sometimes on a wizard for his phantoms or for Shroud of the Phantasm. The additional attack on k.o. is fun and also works on summons. BotEP: good Ngati's Tusk: nice but too late for me to build a char around pikes. Unfortunately the other unique pikes on the way are not too exciting unless you build a char who can reliably get a plant or beast effect for unlocking Lord of the Forest on Lance of the Midwood Stag. Like a Barb/Druid for example.

I'm so guilty. I sometimes oppose posters who want to start their forum career with a childish and irrational rant and then I insist on being reasonable. I know, I know: super lawful evil... Or I called out SonicMage when he used the words "fact" and "truth" every time he voiced his subjective opinion. But so did everybody else... so maybe Sonic doesn't count. But hey @xzar_monty - we clashed one or two times. Did you feel "put down" or "denigrated"? I mean I cried a bit but I got over it. I also disagree with @thelee from time to time. It's a miracle he's still here after all those nasty attacks I launched. He def. took Thick-Skinned or Stoic Steel. Or both...

The usual monk is micro heavy. Especially Torment's Reach (which is the most powerful ability the monk has in my opinion) needs a lot of micromanagement to be effective. I once made a special disabler monk who was supposed to be run by AI mostly and who skipped Torment's Reach: It worked quite well.

That's what I meant when I wrote that players don't know what the description means. And how could they? What you said would also be a reasonable interpretation. However my tests with Justice and the two flails (long time ago) indicated that it's a separate lash and the base dmg is unchanged. You can't see the separate lash in the combat log very often because it gets eaten up by DR most of times (there is no MIN dmg for lashes). But if you do high dmg per hit or attack enemies with low DR you can witness the second lash in the combat log. With Justice it's visible a bit more often since the base dmg of a great sword is higher than that of flails and thus the chance of the 10% lash to overcome 1/4 DR is higher. I don't think that mechanic ever changed.

@kanisatha Interesting that you bring this up now when somebody doesn't agree with you. Before it didn't seem to bother you, the would-be champion of the downtrodden whom got caught in our devastating stampede. Or is it just...

It's not really hidden. But the weapon description is not very clear and many players just overlook the second lash or don't realize what the description means: There are two other weapons that have this (with a double burning lash instead of crush): Starcaller and Unforgiven, both unique flails.

I think PoE's publicity mostly came from its Kickstarter campaign - and that it was promoted as "spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate from former Black Isle devs (now Obsidian)" which made several gaming magazines and -sites pick it up.

Justice is a good Great Sword. It often gets overlooked that it has a secret additional mini-crushing lash of 10% on top of it's obvious 25% crushing lash. If you do significant per-hit damage this additional 10% can make some difference. Per-hit damage has to be high to enable the 10% lash to overcome 1/4 of crush DR. So rogue is a good fit. Or use everything to lower crush DR on enemies (like Fighter's Sundering Blow). DR bypass like Vulnerable Attack does not help with lashes unfortunately.

No. Afaik it has +100% turning time (takes 2 turns for a jibe instead of 1), its chance getting hit is 60% instead of 55% (sloop) and with the money you need to buy a dhow (35,000) I can easily buy the Red Dream hull upgrade (16,000) and still having faster jibe, more hull health (90 vs. 65) and spared 18k. With master cannoneers it's not that important to deal a ton of damage per cannon salve but to cause special events like flooding, man over board and such. If you can cause this often you win since the enemy will always have to react to that and can't fire back. And the 1 turn jibe helps a lot with that. You can send enemies into a never-ending loop of special events which will win you the fight. That's why I always would use Berath's Blessing points for the cheap multi-master sailors you can buy in Port Maje. I never had any troubles without a boatswain that are worth remembering. Hence the sloop is by far the best ship in my book (if you look at the cost-benefit ratio). I use the Berath sails which came with my game. Usually don't need to upgrade the sloop's sails for ship combat. It's only a thing with the Voyager (+flamethrower) for me.

Thank you for translating my thoughts into better English than my German brain ever could. --- So back to the armchair. Another hint for thelee's #1: Pathfinder: Kingmaker was funded with Kickstarter. D:OS I and II were funded with Kickstarter as well. As was PoE. Keeping in mind that they are targeting a rel. small audience all sold well enough regardless of critics (in a certain spectrum) it seems. Deadfire was funded with Fig. This is no proof but it seems that Kickstarter has quite some impact on the publicity. Like daven already said. I think you need to reach that niche audience, reach those RPG players - as many as possible - in order to sell a lot of copies of an isometric, text-heavy cRPG. Add to this the assumption that some of the cRPG crowds who cherish Baldur's Gate etc. might be a tad conservative with their settings and might not be too hyped for a Caribbean pirate themed Pillars game - also because the first one already wasn't too much like Baldur's Gate despite the "spiritual successor" tag. We got the grog pet for a reason. Then add the situation where there suddenly was a lot more competition in that niche market. Then this conglomeration would be a plausible theory for a significant sales drop. No evidence, still educated guessing. The other stuff comes on top. Also maybe applicable to Tyranny? Expectations too high, no Kickstarter, different marketing strategy and setting ("this time you're evil in the kinda bronze age, hohoho") more competition... However, if this was true it would be kind of bad? Smaller RPG studios would be trapped into using Kickstarter (if they didn't have a potent publisher who can put up a big marketing campaign), use the old settings if they wanted to maximize sales... Druidstone did none of that and didn't do too well either (despite having some publicity as creators of Legend of Grimrock I & Ii). And then we have Disco Elysium which did none of that. Although I think in this case the game profited immensely from its uniqueness and overall quality which led to overwhelmingly good press reviews and an overall hype before release. Also the marketing material I saw was very neat and convincing and I saw it in a lot of places. I didn't see any of that for Deadfire. If you weren't following Obsidian or WorldOfEternity on Twitter or roaming these forums I guess you would not have seen any marketing material for it...? Did somebody experience that campaign otherwise?

You are missing that we have two games here, the second being a sequel to the first one. If we only had one game and its reviews then your point would be more viable. But we have a first game which sold well and did get good reviews from users and critics alike - which weakens the argument that a lot of players didn't like certain aspects of the game and therefore didn't buy the second. And then we have the second game which score is equally good but sold less than half. So no matter how you look at it: it is unlikely (not impossible) that the massive sales drop stems from the things you listed alone. And of course user reviews are known data. As are surveys. They are very similar. Tell your favorite polling agency that they were working with non-data all the time... In this case we even have significant sample sizes (around 10,000 reviews on Steam alone). Of course it doesn't need to be a representative sample of the population[sic] but a representative sample of PoE- or Deadfire players. If Pillars had sold 1,000,000 Steam copies then 10,000 Steam reviews is def. a representative sample size. And while a survey may not be 100% accurate most of times it can give a good approximation. Reviews don't prove any theory, but they are indications and make some theories less likely than others. That's what I'm pointing out again and again and that's what you refuse to acknowledge for whatever reason. Besides reviews we also had the Obsidian Backer survey they did after PoE, telemetry from Deadfire, post mortem talk of Josh Sawyer, a fired* marketing person at Obsidian and other pieces of information that nearly all do not align with your theory. Reviews was just one data point but I think it is the most obvious one and it's easy to verify. *wasn't actually fired but his contract was based on success of the marketing campaign. He had to go so it is safe to assume that the marketing goals were not achieved.

Afaik Josh said using bugs is fair game. But it's their call after all so maybe you should ask him on Twitter before investing all that time.

Sadly it seems that both @Phenomenum as well as @MaxQuest have left the forum.

Correct. You cannot know that the fight in Gorecci Str. is avoidable a lot easier if you come from the south. The usual way in is from the jail. If you don't have good stealth already on one party member it's very difficult to not trigger the fight. Fun fact though: if you reload the map from autosave (after getting crushed) you can usually sneak past them without them turning hostile. I guess it has something to do with the dialogue the looters usually have when you enter for the first time and which triggers their hostility. It's missing when you reload.

This is a theory I can get behind. Don't know if it plays a major role but at least it explains nicely why players may have dropped PoE and didn't buy Deadfire without having an impact on its score. On the other hand: isometric RPGs occupy a narrow niche in today's gaming market. I would argue that the majority of players who bought PoE knew what to expect (I mean lots of text and all that "boring" stuff that's usually in those games). After all even PoE is nowhere near even low-selling AAA titles. So in order to let the sequel drop as hard as Deadfire dropped there has to be something more it seems...? Also only anecdotal, but I read about several players (who played PoE and found it good but were no hardcore fans) who completely missed that Deadfire was even happening.

There is no science in this thread. I mean besides the "scientist" card you waved around in a rather self-contradictory way in order to answer xar's question . But there are some numbers, facts and insights from the devs (who have access to telemetry) we can use. And some of them clash with what you and Bleak deem to be the main cause for the massive sales drop of Deadfire compared to PoE. What clashes are for example critics' and users' reviews. Doesn't mean your take is completely wrong, but those discrepancies make your theories very unlikely to be the main reason of a massive sales drop. In my opinion they played a minor part. But that's just my guess. I can't say how big the part is. I'm just quite sure that they can't play a major role since that would mean we would see that in users' and critics' reviews. I didn't claim my or several other theories are the definite answer. I only said that they don't clash as hard with the numbers/facts/statements. For example the "marketing failure" (here I include the move from Kickstarter to Fig). Or the theory that the setting put potential players off. Those are also only educated guesses - but they align with what we know. Those aren't even my theories. The only thing I brought up was that maybe the setting put players off and others chimed in. The rest is a collection of theories that were brought up and deemed reasonable when we look at the data at hand. And therefore, yes: they are not entirely unsubstantiated and "better" (in the sense that they seem to be more likely) than others which clash with the data. Are they true? We will most likely never now. Still it is reasonable to point logical errors out and it is reasonable to question your theories if they don't take known data into account. Unless you can't give a plausible explanation how this clash can get resolved then I'll continue to question your take. You may not like it and get frustrated or even angry, but it's reasonable. It's not "my theory vs. your theory". It's me seeing a flaw in your argumentation and pointing it out. Did the same with xar - he took it better I must say. If you point out an error of mine then that's fine as well. It's a discussion after all and that's what these forums are for. I'm the last person to not say "good point" once you make one. But so far you didn't. That doesn't mean that those cases you described aren't there. I just question that those lead to such a massive sales drop while players who actually played the game obviously liked it (on average). Another theory that runs into the exact same problem: "It's the bugs". Because they are indeed annoying. Would make sense if user critics would reflect that. But same rebuttal: There were complaints about bugs - but reviews don't hint that it was a major problem for most players. Obsidian has a reputation for buggy games: hasn't hurt PoE or Outer World sales. --- Disco Elysium: if we want to take the number of reviews on Steam and try to guess sales numbers then we can see that it has about the same amount of reviews as Deadfire iirc (or was it PoE? correct me if I'm wrong) then I guess we could deduce that it sold about as many copies? Not reliable of course, more of a hint. At the same time I believe its budget was a lot smaller than Deadfire's so it should have been a financial success. After all Josh said that Deadfire was a disappointment when it comes to sales, but was doing "ok" financially. Don't know how that statement fits into the whole "fig investment" disaster though. Deadfire would have been a financial success if Ship Combat and Full VO hadn't been included. Also what Gromnir said seems to be true: expectations were way too high. Mostly due to the success of D:OS --> D:OS2 as Josh said. Note that Larian didn't switch crowdfunding platforms...

I wasn't there (only joined after the release of PoE) and thus I didn't witness what was going on first-hand during beta and pre-release. Afaik Sensuki was very outspoken about stuff he didn't like in the beta. But I can't say if he was a source of toxicity or not. Gromnir once spoke about that time but I can't find his post anymore.

Pillar of Faith? Interesting! Those spells all do single target dmg only so I guess it's maybe not worth it if you don't want to take it for your weapon anyway. But good to know. If there was an AoE spell that accidentially worked with Vulnerable Attack - that would be really neat.

You mean because we won't follow your line of argumentation but keep challenging it with... reason? Sounds a bit like You can ask Gromnir why Josh left the forums. I can assure you our civil style of discussion was not the case. I'm pretty sure Josh could easily handle the forum in its current form. His departure had other reasons than simply not agreeing.

Science doesn't use anecdotal reference or personal intuition as its base. It's exactly the opposite of what science should do. I didn't mean you but the post from Bleak who said that the "pirate setting" theory was amusing. That got mixed up a bit while trying to address several posts about the "players didn't like the implementation of X" theories.

I don't really know if Penetrating Shot works with Iconic Projection. If so then good. Azalin's Helmet doesn't stack with Rabbit Fur Gloves. Merciless Hand (+30% crit dmg, Doemenel) and Dungeon Delver (+10% cri damage) would stack with Helm or Gloves for a total of +100% dmg on crit (50% regular + 30% + 10% +10%).