Boeroer

PoE had some other problems as well. For example if you sorted your inventory in a certain way (like let's say by value) it would not "keep" that sorting but would apply the sorting algorithm every time you opened the stash. With a lot of items in the stash (which is limitless on PC) you'd run into severe performance issues. In the earlier version also every summon you cast would find its way into the saved state of the game, never disappearing in memory. This got fixed at some point. Save game files wouldn't need to grow like crasy if players wouldn't expect to get back all the stuff they dropped/sold. But because players want to have the opportunity to place stuff into chests or sell stuff and be able to buy it again later for an unlimited amount of time the save game needs to take care for all those items you don't carry around anymore, too. It would help if the shop owner simply sold your stuff after some time (remove from shop) or random lootes would empty chests (that are not on your ship or in your stronghold). I don't know if tiling the maps would be so simple. PoE and Deadfire are 2.5 D games where 3D objects get placed on a handdrawn, 2D maps. Elevations and obstructions are mostly optical illusions. You can see that when you are trying to cast a spell like Iconic Projection up a staircase. So maybe it's difficult to split up such a map that's a rather wild but nice-looking conglomerate of 2D and 3D game objects. No idea though. Just a thought.

What do you mean?

Activate "auto-pause" and "end movement" on trap detection in the game options menu at any time.

Pierce the Bell: not worth it in my opinon if you have Arterial Strike and a ranged weapon with decent PEN. For 1 Guile AS will give you more dmg (5% multiplicative because of Power Level and raw DoT vs. 20% additive of PtB), less PEN (+2 vs. +5 of PtB), applies Hobbled for further Sneak Attacks and even Deathblows (vs. no affliction with PtB). Devastating Blow: basically the same. The mechanic usually leads to massive overkill when it's most potent (enemies' health is low) and doesn't do impressive damage when the enemy hasn't low health. Even on bosses I prefer Arterial Strike because the raw DoT on movement can be very useful here as well. With all my ranged builds both abilites could not outperform Crippling Strike which will compete for Guile. In my opinion you're nearly always better of with 2 * Crippling Strike instead of 1 Pierce the Bell or 1 Devastating Blow. So I wouldn't take any of them. Double cost (2 instead of 1 Guile) is just too expensive for what they do. Especially with Hand Mortar/Fire in the Hole I wouldn't use them. Arterial Strike's raw DoT on every enemy in an AoE is just too good. And AR doesn't matter there. Spiritshift: you get two weapons with decent base damage and a lash, yes. Lashes are multiplicative damage bonuses (unlike additive stuff like Sneak Attack etc.). Maybe more importantly maybe (but often overlooked): All forms get decent armor with 0 recovery: 8 base and scales with PL (+1) and every 5th char level (+1). This is very good for dps. Unlike other melee classes who want to wear armor you won't get slowed down - and attack speed is the most impactful variable for dps. Some forms have increased dps, others have higher AR. More specifically: Cat form gets fast claws (only 3 sec. recovery istead of 4). Its Cat Flurry ability boosts dps a lot. Boar gets raw DoT lash on top of elemental lashes (also multiplicative)and health regeneration. If you combine with other regenerative effects he can be quite tanky. Gets +1 engagement which helos with tanking. Bear gets +2 AR (that's pretty huge - better than plate armor without recovery malus). If combined with other AR buffs this can make the Bear very tanky. He also gets +1 engagement which helps with the tanking. He also has a frightening roar while shifted (prevents offensive ability use of enemies) Wolf runs faster (25%) - this can also help with dps since you won't waste much time running around. Since all items except weapon and armor stay active you can stack it with Boots of Speed and/or Long Stride etc. Also has Knock Down. Stag's Carnage is really bad. The +7 defenses are nice but nothing I would write home about. Storm Blight's jumping projectile doesn't stack with Driving Flight and has rel. low base dmg. Fury is interesting because of its passives. I think the Spiritshift form is too weak. So that's what you get when shifting. Actually when combining Spiritshift with either a dps class (e.g. Streetfighter) or a tanky class (e.g. Goldpact Knight) you can get pretty great results. Imagine a gilded Bear with huge AR (Paladin's passives + Gilded Enmity + Bear's fur), attacking with Wildstrike claws and Eternal Flames (+10% burning lash to all your following attacks, including spells) with no recovery penalty. This is sturdy yet does very decent melee damage AND can heal, buff, cast AoE dmage or CC etc. Flanked Cat Streetfighter with Cat Flurry + Wildstrike + Heating Up + Sneak Attacks hits incredibly fast and has high dps while it's not too squishy (can heal itself etc.).

As with party members, crew members don't die when they go down but only get knocked out.

😱 Woha... Deadfire uses asset streaming (unlike PoE). It helped a lot on PC. No idea why the loading times in PS4 are that ridiculously long...

I'd have no problem with that. May be better for new console players to find a thread/list with post-last-patch builds.

Unlike PoE, item bonuses generally all stack (not only weapons). You can use an amulet with INT+2 and a Helmet with INT+2 and they would stack to +4 INT.

Yeah (I opened and maitained it) - but to be fair the builds there are not that new. Most of the non-day-one-builds still work perfectly fine though. But since the foum software update I shy away from editing that list. You can see that the formatting is a bit more complex. It was no big deal with the old forum which supported BBCode - but now that's not an option anymore and thus it's a nightmare to edit. There are a few new(ish) builds in the forum but I didn't put them in yet because of that reason. I fear I might brick the whole list and would have to reformat and type stuff again...

Ooops - I only assumed that versus evil had a forum and stuff (Paradox who did the console port of PoE, had that). Now checked and they seem to have not. Only way to contact them seems to be Twitter, Facebook and via eMail. Deafire's technical subforum is here (I saw you already posted there, just for other readers who might find this) : https://forums.obsidian.net/forum/130-pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire-technical-support-spoiler-warning/

Good thought! I indeed unpause from time to time accidentally because Auto-Pause was a bit faster than I was. You know what also would be cool? Pre-pause. That's a pause that rolls your game back a fraction of a second (the time it usually takes to process what's on the screen, decide to pause and press the button. Maybe even combined with time-distorting effects like a "rewind 5 sec"-spell.

I would say that's pretty unacceptable. Did you guys scan the Versus Evil forum or the technical subforum for any news on this (like maybe there's a patch coming or a workaround)?

Arcane Assault was a 2/encounter ability in PoE while the spells were 4/rest per tier. In Deadfire all spells are 2/encounter per tier so I guess Arcane Assault didn't fit in mechanically. Why they chose to make it a kind-of unique spell that you can only access via grimoire (like the certain other unique spells like Shadowflame, Brilliant Departure or Draconic Fury) instead of turning it into a normal spell that you can learn: no idea. They did it with Arcane Veil (although that was per-rest in PoE and not per-encounter). Casting times: you'll get used to it. Caster have a lot more spells uses now because it all turned from per-rest to per-encounter. That means more power. At the same time the devs didn't want to make the spells' effects too weak to counterbalance that. So they had to get longer casting times to prevent wild spell stakkatos. Also they wanted to make interrupts more meaningful. So spells stayed powerful and can have a big impact when cast - but at the same time (if you're a smart player) you can keep an eye on spellcasters and interrupt them with certain abilites. This gives combat more tactical depth and makes interrupting meaningful. In PoE it was just adding (fractions of) seconds to enemies' actions. I think most experienced players would call this change a big improvement, but it's a bit hard to grasp for new players or people who want to fight as fast as possible because the advantages are not that obvious. Casting speed/progress: the action indicator above the caster's head should give you a hint during casting. It should show you how long the casting lasts and also how long recovery is. The circle above the head should show an icon of the spell you are casting and the ring around it will show how far you got. The green bar not only shows your health but also should display a recovery bar right under the health bar (not visible in this screenshot I got from Google). What I said is for RTwP mode. It may be that it's different in Turn Based mode.

That seems to be the case. But one can't expect them to have an in-house expert for every language that a game gets translated to. I really wonder which companies did the translations though and how much money they got. A assume they are american companies? Why won't you use a company from the respective country? Like a Russian translation company for the Russian version, a German one for the German version and so on?

I agree nearly completely. But I guess you also can make decent money from smallish games (percentage-wise). You'd have to cut stuff like Full VO and localisation though. Also extensive companion reactions etc. might be too expensive.

PS: you could also check the technical subforum and the Versus Evil forums. Versus Evil did the console port of Deadfire so there might be something in their forums which can help you.

I read a bit into it (mostly posts from 2018) and the comments of @BMac about those issues. It may be that it's a bad quest state in your save files which causes this. But it's just wild guessing. I tagged BMac so he maybe sees this and can answer. Hope you can fix it!

But good to get confirmed.

I guess Elemental Induction and Soul Storm will stack with Moinor Avatar because one is from a weapon and non-active (not manually activated) which usually stacks with everything. But I never tested.

Oh man that's too bad. You are right: we had that bug on PC as well but since I haven't seen it for ages I forgot what the solutions could be. I will try to find out and if I do (and it might work on consoles) I will post again.

This

1. After. No idea if related or not. 2. Afaik it did. First of all it got crowdfunded (not to 100% though) so there was less risk. And Josh once said that while Deadfire did disappoint them it was still "ok". A bit vague though. 3. Several. It seems they are producing more stuff than ever. At least if you look at the number of employees and the job offers that are currently online. Also the development of several projects was confirmed (with code names). 4. Not yet. You can't buy it, the alpha rules are for free. It's a pet project of Josh. Its rules are also vastly different from the PC games' (for example it's classless). I don't know if they ever planned to earn money with it. 5. I guess so. As I said Obsidian is bigger than before (in terms of employee count) and has several games in the pipeline. Microsoft also bought some other RPG studios and I guess they want some big RPGs for the Xbox (most likely in the fashion of TOW though since that's console friendly). As Gromnir already said: isometric party based RPG is a niche. I wouldn't expect too much from Microsoft in that regard. But maybe they'll surprise us. A small yet neat game can still be very profitable. Doesn't need to be expensive to sell millions of copies (see Slay the Spire, Reigns, Stardew Valley, Battle Brothers etc.).

Yes I know. Sorry... I mean Forbidden FIst is still nice though - even without mods. You just need to know it's "special needs". It can be just frustrating that the ability doesn't work as you would expect in some cases and get no hint from the game. Most players won't even notice maybe - but the ones that do will be a bit disappointed. So better to know that stuff before you start a Forbidden Fist. It's still awesome if you get it right. It could work if you use Duality of Mortal Presence (INT) and tend to always have a high wound count (+10 INT) or use Enlightened Agony (+5 INT - I like it in combination with Iron Wheel on a FFist). But honestly I would never minimize INT on a monk - not even on a Forbidden Fist. Except if I plan to use Ring of Mule's Wit which can be an efficient move if you are planning to drop INT anyway - because you would gain massive resistances for only losing 2 INT, dropping from 3 to 1. But then stuff like Duality (INT) and Enlightened Agony wouldn't do much for you because the -8 from RING would also take away INT points from those buffs. So you would be truly dump as a mule. But also very, very resistant of course... But normally I wouldn't drop it - also because of Swift Strikes' and Thunderous Blows' duration. It's annoying for me if those run out too quickly (this might be no problem on Turn Based mode though - no idia). Also later the AoE of Resonant Touch (if you go single class that ability is a must-have in my opinion) would be too small I reckon. The high RES and items shorten the curse's duration and damage sufficiently - and higher or lower INT doesn't matter that much in that regard (I mean as soon as your RES and items come together - in the early game it does matter more obviously). As I said I would not max MIG because it multiplies with Power Level and Power Leves scales the curse's self damage up. But INT... I would keep it at 10 at least. Just my personal taste with INT in general though. I find it important for most of my chars.

You should work on your reading comprehension. I didn't change the subject but brought in the reviews as a counterargument - which was precisely aimed at your "bugs lead to massive sales drop" theory. No change of subject whatsoever. I also never said that you were ungrateful. If you should quote me if I wrote that. I said that if you get something for free you will be less likely to get angry if it doesn't work as expected then if you had to pay for it - which was also aimed at your "bugs" theory - especially because you brought up the Deadfire Pack as an example for bugs that would make hundreds of thousands of players so angry that they would skip Deadfire. You should be able to comprehend that. At least if you are not trying to misinterpret me on purpose. You changed the subject by deviating into the realms of "It all doesn't matter because Microsoft bought them". This is plain obvious. Thank you. Exactly my point - neatly summarized. Sarcasm is uncalled for. I am well aware that the console port has massive issues atm. Those may indeed lead to frustration and bad sales numbers. Or it may not. Nobody knows yet. But I'm not denying that it may happen. However - we were speaking about the poor performance in the past - on PC. The release on console has nothing to do with that. Especially not since it just started and nobody here has any numbers. We could talk about the combined sales numbers of PC and consoles after some months. That might be interesting. And then bad porting might indeed be a factor for disappointing sales numbers. But in this thread it is not relevant. It's just another smoke screen.

One important thing besides invisibility and Salvation of Time and Barring Death's Door is Withdraw: you need to protect Vela. Priest of Skaen has all this in one neat package.