Abbzug

The latest announcement for next week's patch (1.1.1.0) says they're going to increase font size. Thread's in the announcements and news forum.

I never felt the need to use third person view in FO and TES because the game frequently showed my character doing cool stuff via killcams. That's what's missing to me. You can't do that in this game because of the camera focus on companion abilities. To have both would be too much. The encounters right now are so easy that most of the time in them is spent watching companion abilities. My guess is that companion abilities was a cost saving measure since it's cheaper to animate six different weapon animations instead of however many different weapons are in game. If this game has a sequel with a higher budget my guess is they'll abandon cinematic companion abilities and add killcams for the protagonist. That would be far preferable of course since we can already benefit from playing dress up with our companions.

What the title says. I assume it's just a display bug. If you put armor or a helmet on a companion that grants a skill bonus it doesn't change their skill level in their character sheet. A quick load fixes it. Haven't tested it, but probably any loading screen would fix it as well. It's not a big deal. Just affects the companions as far as I can tell not the main character. This is for the PC version on the Xbox store.

This line perplexes me. ESO (Zenimax/bethesda) and POE (Obsidian) have no ties to each other, except Obsidian once made a Fallout game for Bethesda. So not sure what Dragonknights would have to do with this game? If you weren't saying the 2 were made by the same company, where did the second line come from and what does it have to do with anything? Dragonknight is ostensibly a martial class but it uses spells for its abilities, that's all he was getting at. It's like a fighter that's been jedified or merlinized. He wasn't comparing the two companies.

This seems like a strange place for this post.

Going from a 30% chance to convert hits to grazes to a 40% chance is a 14% reduction in hits taken. While going from 30% to 37% is a 10% reduction in hits taken. It's goofy on the surface, but at least this way every source of conversion behaves consistently. It doesn't seem fair to me that any conversion should be more powerful for someone that already has some.

Skaen

Unless I completely misread his post I don't think his point was that it was a good thing, it sounded clearly sardonic to me.

Could do without the self-effacement, but it's not flamebait. I don't think that returning to per rest and health-endurance would change much. Rationing resources and attrition just aren't possible without maps like PoE had. It seems like Obsidian listened to all the people who whined about meaningless encounters and took that as gospel, and they ignored the years of passion put into the builds forum by people who actually liked to theorycraft against the content. Imo they should've just funneled the first group into story mode.

As long as there's difficulty settings for people to breeze through the game with I don't see how you can complain about the game also having a difficulty setting that challenges players as well.

I expect it'll come out about an hour ago.

I always thought the beauty of tabletop D&D was that whatever party you had your DM could work around.

He realizes that but he's complaining that you can't read the dialogue with only your keyboard.

It's kind of reductive to pare those characters down to just two types. But I don't entirely disagree that there's a lot of Felicia Day types and a lot of Sarah Connors. But I think there's more difference than you give it credit. Also I think you have to give some leeway for the limits of the medium. It's a fifty hour game, which sounds like a lot but it's a huge cast and the whole game doesn't revolve around dialogue. We don't have a lot of time with these characters, so their traits are going to be exaggerated to make them pronounced.

Has inspiration and has concentration are useful, but if you have a lot of buffs which can cover similar things or don't have those conditions it won't do a lot of good. So yeah you have to use reset timers. The problem with reset timers is that they persist outside of combat. So if you set them too long (like the duration the buff would last on you) you might not be able to cast them in your next fight. If you have two buffs of the same spell level though reset timer works perfectly because the timers can be really short. Like if you wanted to cast Infuse with Vital Essence and Arcane Veil you'd just give the first one a short reset timer like five seconds or so and they'd both cast and be ready for your next fight. You don't have to worry about casting them over and over because you've already spent your spell slots.

I don't have anything thoughtful to add, so I guess that puts me in the same company as the OP unfortunately. But wow. This is rough.

I don't know if this is a spoiler or not. But...

People get way too hung up on the names of attributes. This and the 5-man party change are the two things I find most inconsequential to go grognard over.

Druids, priest, and wizards get a set number of spells per spell level each encounter. Ciphers and chanters are pretty much unchanged from the first game. Paladins, Fighters, Rangers, Rogues and Barbarians get a resource at the start of every encounter which they can use for abilities. They each have their own name (zeal, discipline, bond, guile, rage), but they function the same. It's pretty close to the druid, priest and wizard system, except your resources aren't split up by ability level. Monks still have the wounds system from the first game to use on abilities. But they also have a second resource called mortifications that they can use on other abilities. Abilities which use mortifications are typically stronger since they don't regenerate during combat normally. edit: I'm sure I'm missing something, but the best way to get accurate information is to post something wrong so a dozen people who would otherwise ignore your post can correct you.

Conditional effects don't show up in the character sheet. You can test this with stuff like boots of speed (deflection vs disengagements) and other items.

Not really, but then I did a few playthroughs of the first game over the years. I understand the argument, but for me knowing it'll be a better game months and years later just means I'll have more reason to revisit it if I want.

Sure, but you're still a monk. As long as you have some drugs in a quick slot it's never an issue.

I have Eder set up as a dual wield swashbuckler. He's set up to charge spellcasters, use escape if he's bloodied, and throw out some other stuff. He has a lot of engagement slots, and is using Duskfall with the acc/dmg buff on first attack (charge) with the soulbound dagger in the off. Aloth as a fighter/wizard. He throws on his buffs, throws out a missile spell and then uses charge to rush in. The missile spell is just so he arrives at the frontline after my protagonist character and Eder have locked down the front. He's dual wielding but unarmored. Xoti as a monk/priest. Kind of similar to Aloth in that she casts devotions of the faithful before heading in. She's set up to do a lot of healing, withdraw, and the blessed harvest nuke. I use her starting weapons. I don't use her as much as Aloth and Eder as a frontliner though now. Pallegina as chanter/paladin. Just ultimate buff bot. Summons a creature then throws out paralyzes. Plus heals as needed. She just dual wields melee weapons, but I think blunderbusses or pistols might be better since she can hit my ranged member with auras a bit better. Maia as ranger/rogue. Nothing that special here. I'm not even sure you need ranged party members in Deadfire, which is weird because in PoE I found the front line got too crowded with more than like 3-4 melee (at least until the WM zones). But she does perform well, and I never really need to pay attention to her unless I need to evasive roll away. Tekehu as chanter/druid. Just a mid range (using scepter) nuker and support. Throws out nukes from his invocations and druid casts. Heals from his druid casting. And runs ancient memory mostly. I let the AI decide on nuke placement even if it means friendly fire. I feel like avoiding friendly fire is a lot less important than the first game since there's no endurance. Fassina (sidekick but I liked her personality) as a pure conjurer. The only single class character I use. I like to swap her with Maia at times. Summons her highest level phantom, then throws out nukes and casts arcane veil if she gets in trouble. As with Tekehu I let the AI decide on where to place her spells. The good thing about conjuration nukes is that if you get hit by one you can just walk out of it. Not much to say about Serafen (though I have him as barb/cipher). I'm not a big fan of ciphers in their current state. And barbarians seem less fun than they were in the last game. So I rarely use him.

I don't know that this is a bug. But the action set cooldown timer under the behavior editor persists outside of combat. Put an ability with a cooldown timer of 60 seconds and if you fight one battle, it will go off fine. But if you start another battle within that time the ability won't go off in the next fight. Maybe this is intentional but I don't know why it would be.

I love the AI system, but the lack of any kind of explanation for what some of the things do really annoys me. The reset timer issue is super annoying when you have a lot of buffs. I wish you could specifically set buffs or debuffs to check instead of relying on checks like concentration, aff/insp, timer, etc.. Also I can't really figure out how to reliably use chanter invocations like the paralyze one. Also it's a gigantic pain in the ass to move things around in the priority list. Some of my characters only have a few conditions, but some have like 15 and it's a real hassle to work with the UI.