Lamppost in Winter

I was coming at this more from what was intended by the devs to be scaling, since they say everything should be, but I see your points. Deathblows is definitely still in, from the patch notes. Before release Josh said something along the lines that Sneak Attack would be weaker at lower levels and scale. I think something like 30% at PL1 scaling to 75% at PL9 wouldn't be so bad? From what the more experienced players say (my experience is somewhat different), PoE Sneak Attack is great at low levels but at late game it's not as good, even with Deathblows. If they're right, I think scaling Sneak Attack might work. It does raise the question of what other class passives should (i.e., are intended to) get PL scaling. Backstab? Ascendant mode duration? Assassinate?

Oh yeah I'm using Q for my offensive ability, does it matter? Yeah, I opened a thread with the same topic. Turns out that when cheats are enabled, Q, K and I believe P? act as "instant damage/kill" hotkeys, so you can just get through an encounter by hovering your mouse over a target and either instantly killing it or taking chunks of its health away.

In the latest stream Josh answered a question "Why doesn't Sneak Attack and Carnage scale with Power Level?" with "Those things and everything should, let us know if that isn't the case." So Sneak Attack and Carnage don't scale with Power Level, or if it does there's nothing in the UI that indicates it. What else is there currently that doesn't scale with PL, or isn't clear whether it does or not?

Are you using a hotkey like Q or K and do you have cheats turned on?

Are there any planned changes to the Black Jacket subclass? Most seem to agree that their bonus is quite small compared to their malus.

Yeah, I think the change was reeally excessive. I do get it's hard to make these big boss fights in these sorts of games challenging for a full party without making them health sponges or dropping a lot of adds, but spawning halfway through the fight with no warning is just not fun for me. My preference would be to give it more abilities, maybe with some way to regain its Concentration so it's not just getting stunlocked. For the record though, I'm of the opinion the Adra Dragon fight could have been improved by dropping most/all of the Adragans and giving the dragon some Cipher abilities or something. Also this might be a symptom of me not being great at this game and running a fairly unoptimized party, but until the Blights spawned, I thought the tune-up to the Titan's difficulty was OK; not too health spongey but felt more like a significant challenge.

I haven't checked whether Blast or Powder Burns have changed yet, but Carnage and Barbaric Blow still do not have any AoE markers like they did in PoE. These would be very helpful, especially considering Berserkers can harm allies now.

WHY DO YOU HAVE IT AND I DON"T. You use steam or gog? The Tutorials tab is empty for me as well; just press Tab when you're in the quest journal and it should take you to the Cyclopedia.

Both in the Bestiary and on the combat tooltips, I'd like to be able to see a description of unique creature abilities, like we get for player abilities. I do understand that there's a lot of abilities and maybe not time to write descriptions for all of them, though. Failing that, I think it would be helpful if we could at least right click on abilities in the Bestiary to get a popup description, for example, if you go to the entry for Delemgans and want to see what, say, Nature's Balm, does without exiting the Bestiary.

Just go far enough so that you're within ideal cannon range. Then it's mostly shoot, jive, hold position for accuracy, sometimes shuffle your crew around. I didn't love ship combat, but was never down on it like a lot of people seem to be. It's fine, but not great. I do have to say it feels much better in the current beta, probably something to do with the revised turn system and the more polished animations.

This may be just because I got owned, but the Engwithan Titan fight getting a bunch of Sand Blights spawning halfway through is...not great. In general I find wave combat to be unenjoyable. Seconding most of the praise others have offered.

messed up that they're putting lootcrates in deadfire. chris avellone is turning in his grave.

With Supergiant it’s quite clear that music is part of the game (especially with transistor were its tied directly to protagonist). It is not only that game designers design the game and composer fills it with soundtrack, but there are systems build to interact with soundtrack, and I be that as game gets developed it goes together with thinking about how OST will work. Regarding battle music: it’s a direct reference to BG series who did the same thing. I got quite a nostalgia kick out of battle music and how it was implimented. Industry developed some neat tricks throughout the 20 years though, and I wouldn’t mind one bit if Deadfire would modernise it’s music a bit. Very true that Supergiant build their games with the music already in mind. Other games do some adaptive soundtrack tricks, though; for example, Dragon Age II (dare I mention it) changes battle music to a different, tenser track when you're doing badly in a fight.

Transistor did something really neat with this where while exploring, the percussion track is muted, and fades in when combat starts. Then when you enter the pause mode, the instrumentals become muted and distant, while the main character's humming comes in.

lmao where my exactly 5 other "Relaxed" voters at Although since I'm super familiar with PoE's systems and have played the beta a lot, I could probably stand to start on Classic, depending on how much time I have to play.

I almost invariably make my first playthrough of games on Easy so I can consume as much content as possible without hitting any difficulty walls (also I'll probably be too busy to play much on release anyway), then graduate to higher difficulties on subsequent playthroughs.

this but unironically

I had no idea what this meant when I first read it and forgot about this topic. Then I came back to the beta and realised hovering over and hitting "Q" applies damage regardless of hotkeys or pause and "U" and "K" automatically kills them. I guess this is a dev cheat codey thing to get through fights quickly?

When my rogue (assassin, if it matters) auto-attacks, sometimes it'll trigger the effect of one of the special abilities, like Confounding Blind or Hobbling Strike, even though I didn't activate it and no Guile was consumed.

Troubling, indeed. Completely unprecedented for checks notes a game to be delayed a month.

This is already a thing, your crew's morale lowering can lead to mutinies.

Where are we getting this? I know you can't talk to them in the current beta, but I assumed that was just a beta thing.

Josh said they wanted the difference between sidekicks and full companions to be clear so people didn't get disappointed at their lack of content, so I imagine it'll be telegraphed to the player.

Great question for someone with a Tumblr account I occasionally ask Josh questions on Tumblr but I always seem to miss the windows where he goes on a reply spree.