Rooksx

How many games of significant length don't reuse assets? The list must be small to non-existent.

My Moon Godlike Beserker/Shifter is going to like 1.3 a lot.

It is the recovery that makes it a standard action. That can be overridden to make it a free action in turn-based. { "$type": "Game.GameData.AttackMeleeGameData, Assembly-CSharp", "DebugName": "Blood_Sacrifice_Self", "ID": "effef826-1f55-4284-914b-e1dc6fc12b79", "Components": [{ "$type": "Game.GameData.AttackBaseComponent, Assembly-CSharp", "RecoveryTimeID": "9d15e1c1-c6e1-4b25-bc1d-bf3707f6f534", "OverrideTacticalActionType": "Free" }] } cl.wizard.blood_sacrifice.gamedatabundle

The Blood Sacrifice nerf has changed it from a free action to a standard action in turn-based. I thought that may be a result of giving it a recovery time, but that doesn't seem right as recovery is meant to be equivalent to initiative. It's a pretty significant nerf. For one, my standard opener was to cast a bunch of low-level free action buffs, then use blood sacrifice to restore those tier levels, then cast a standard action spell. That's no longer possible. The bigger impact is that as it's a standard action, you can't do anything else that round. Maybe that's more balanced, not sure yet.

If your're open to Wizard, a Paladin/Wizard Arcane Knight is very solid, if not the most imaginative option. In fact my Kind Wayfarer/Evoker is one of my favourite characters from any cRPG I've played. Melee, magic, tanking, self and party-healing, she can do it all. A great all-rounder that is fairly straightforward to design and play without being broken.

Yes, I am using this build and stumbled on across one of your posts about this. The 'Thunder' aspect of the build still takes useful advantage of one of Pallegina's unique abilities, so it still thematically fits.

If on the Nomad's Brigandine you upgrade to Tactical Withdraw (immunity to disengagement attacks) instead of Feigned Retreat, wouldn't you trigger Offensive Parry every time you disengage? If that's correct, then you don't need to build up all that disengagement defence?

I'd go with RTwP for your first playthrough, particularly if you think it will be your only playthrough. The game was designed for RTwP, so the mechanics are at their most coherent in that mode. TB is the gaming equivalent of a student who runs their French essay through Google Translate. It sort of makes sense, but there are lots of oddities that make it obvious the student didn't spend enough time on the homework. Base stats in PoE aren't meant to have breakpoints, yet in TB they do. Action speed goes from being very important to near useless for non-casters. Most galling of all for me is that you can only take one action (other than moving) per round. Some actions are free, but other trivial actions aren't. It's quite annoying that if you switch weapon or drink a potion, you can't do anything else that round. The system would work better if you had multiple action points with different actions costing different numbers of points. A lot of these TB issues would perhaps be less problematic if encounters had been rebalanced for the slower pace of combat. As it is, TB fights can take a really long time. I don't think TB is bad, but it does feel like the devs weren't able to spend enough time working out the kinks.

What was particularly annoying about the gating in D:OS was that the game initially gave you the illusion of being a lot more open. It seems at first as if you're free too wander wherever you like, only to encounter enemies that you can't possibly beat blocking a path. It would have been preferable for the game to be more honest about its linearity instead of pretending otherwise.

It's not hard to identify why the D:OS setting didn't click for me. The bright campiness of everything was a complete turn-off and made it impossible to get absorbed in the game. That's not to say that the grimdark ambience of PoE1 is so much better. It was overly dreary; a bit of humour would have beneficially lightened the mood. The problem with both PoE game's settings and stories for me is that they're too wrapped up in weird metaphysical concepts and are not personal enough. The population of Eora love to babble on about the gods, souls and the Wheel, but that's not much of a personal motivation to go adventuring. You spend all of PoE1 chasing Thaos without really knowing why. One of the central conflicts in the story is the debate around the use of animancy. It's a little hard though to care about the ethics of an entirely fictional concept which lacks a real-world parallel and has little to do with my PC. PoE2 improved on this in some ways. I really liked the depiction of the caste system in Neketaka. That's a relatable real-world issue, not a load of metaphysical babble. It was particularly good how quests flowed from the caste structure; that's a nice example of linking setting, story and gameplay. Unfortunately there is, as many have noted, a disconnect between Eothas rampaging around and everything else that's happening. It's particularly problematic because the player's apparent motivation is to reclaim their soul from Eothas, which mostly involves more long-winded discussions about fictional concepts. I found it difficult to give a damn about what Eothas was doing.

@AeonsLegend I think the problems you're highlighting really stem from PoE2 generally being too easy. It's understandable that the classes can feel a bit same-y if the game doesn't punish you for sending your frail wizard with his puny dagger into melee. I'm just not convinced that the DnD approach is necessarily better. I find versatile builds that have multiple options in combat the most fun, but building such a character in the DnD-based games is a matter of: detailed planning and meta-knowledge; and/or getting to high levels where you have the capacity to have three different classes and loads of abilities. By this point the game's mechanics are falling apart. In contrast Deadfire's system is well-geared towards versatility. Its implementation of multiclassing is the best I've seen in a CRPG; it permits creativity and versatility without the confusing complexity of something like 3rd edition DnD or Pathfinder, and makes it fairly easy to avoid creating a weak build. Making all stats relevant to all classes is vital to that multiclass system. Yes it's still possible to build game-breaking characters, but it must be extremely difficult to avoid that in an RPG of grand size and depth.

The whole idea behind the stats system was to allow builds to be versatile. It's flat wrong to say "Classes 100% lack uniqueness" - that would mean they're literally identical, which obviously isn't the case. I much prefer PoE's approach to DnD's. It's great that any class can use any weapon and that all stats are relevant to all classes - it reduces some of the frankly tedious complexity of building a character while enabling flexibility.

Upside is that using the BG name easily hooks people. Downside is that some people feel gypped when they don't get whatever they were expecting out of a game that bears the hallowed name. Upside could outweigh the downside. Gamers do need to be a bit more realistic out of what to expect from a modern RPG game though. BG2 was a product of its time. A replica that meets contemporary technical expectations is unlikely to be economic, or even desirable.

It's somewhat odd that people would so vociferously object to BG3 being turn-based given that the underlying DnD system is TB. Suspect that they've donned their rose-tinted spectacles and are forgetting that the BG games constantly betrayed the fact that they're not truly RT in an awkward way. Order your party member to attack. He moves to the enemy, then just stands there doing nothing. After a few seconds he starts attacking. It always looked so weird and would make me wonder for a bit if the 'attack' command hadn't worked, all because in a supposedly RT game everyone has to literally wait their turn before doing anything.

Vertical trees were the problem in both games I mentioned. The cost of improving an ability rank was greater for each rank, which meant you couldn't diversify much without weakening yourself. I dunno how common that approach to classless systems is.

The limited experience I've had with classless cRPGs (Shadowrun Returns and D:OS) raised doubts whether classless is all that it's cracked up to be. In both games, attempts to develop a hybrid build that was proficient in two combat styles results in a character that's bad at both. All the build guides I read recommended building your character in a way that ends up looking a lot like a class.

I wonder how many people who were nostalgic for the BG2 experience, or who had heard so much about how great those IE games were, played PoE and thought, "oh right, there's a reason big developers stopped making games like these. We've all moved on." Maybe even the BG2 fans have had their fill large, complex inaccessible beasts that offer more cerebral than visceral thrills.

Which podcast? Marvel movies are exactly what I was thinking of when I earlier said that people don't want stories that take them out of their comfort zones. Each one is a variation of the same template, yet they are enormously successful. They are solid evidence that the general public like stories that hit familiar beats and don't do anything too different.

The point isn't so much about which makes for better stories, more that the generic setting does have the advantages of being readily comprehensible and flexible. Building a new world can be interesting, but it can be difficult to balance that with telling a compelling story.

@hobbitmonk I pretty much agree with all of that, particularly because many of those thoughts occurred to me when I recently started playing Pathfinder: Kingmaker. I knew zilch about the Pathfinder universe, and yet I quickly grasped the setting and lore as it's all quite familiar. Contrasting this to PoE did illustrate the advantage of a more generic setting - the writers don't have to do so much background work and can focus on crafting a unique story. One of the problems I had with both both PoE games is that they're too wrapped up in their own lore. You're quite possibly right to suggest that writing a story for PoE2 that was set in a familiar background would have been a lot easier.

The island/pirate setting has come up as a negative a few times. If that's not to people's taste then fine, but how many RPGs have a pirate motif compared to the number set in a derivation of Tolkeinesque medieval Europe? If any setting is cliched, it's the latter. As with lots of popular culture, the continued popularity of that motif suggests that people don't want stories to take them too far out of their comfort zones, which is understandable because we naturally connect more strongly with things that are relatable. It just doesn't seem fair to call the Deadfire setting 'tired' when so many other RPGs have a far more generic backdrop.

You have no hard evidence to make this claim with such certainty. This is just another example of, "PoE2 sold poorly because of the things I don't like" reasoning.

I can't see how it's desirable for the difficulty to swing from 'extremely difficult' to 'cakewalk' based on foreknowledge; that just seems like bad game design. Consider the Soulsbourne games - learning your enemies' moves and abilities is vital, but the combat doesn't become trivial because these are action games that depend on your hand-eye coordination to utilise your foreknowledge. That obviously isn't the case for CRPGs. If preparation is all that makes the difference, the combat is pointless.

But that's because BG2's combat frequently revolved around meta-knowledge to counter silly insta-kill abilities. Typical scenario - you enter a fight where you don't know what's going to happen, and get annihilated. Reload, cast spells, drink potions, read scrolls, summon creatures, try fight again, win easily.

As complicated as D&D can be, some fundamental mechanics are fairly simple while their PoE equivalent is obtuse. Good example: the basic question, “how much damage does this weapon do?” is in D&D games easily explicable and displayed on the character sheet, eg “1d8 +2”. In PoE the answer is “11 - 16. But depends on weapon speed, action speed, recovery and enemy armour. And you’ll have to work that yourself; the final result isn’t displayed anywhere.” It shouldn’t be so difficult for the player to determine such basic information.