Lamppost in Winter

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.

Exactly! And this is why I'm also okay with having many LGBTQ characters in games, even if it's more than would be "realistic". Well said.

re: relative powers of single class rogue vs. multiclassed I remember in the campaign he said Sneak Attack would start off weaker and scale with level. Wonder what happened to that idea.

i'm here as hell for streetfighter Iselmyr

I'd also be worried about enemies getting this ability as well since being randomly one-shotted doesn't sound very fun.

1) Devoted gets bonus Pen, damage and other stuff with their preferred weapon. Their whole thing is that they trade versatility for mastery of one weapon type, so in other situation they'll either have to eat the penalties associated with their non-proficient weapons or just deal with not doing as much damage to a certain enemy. 2) At high base damage you still might do enough damage even at lower Pen that it's not worth switching. Stacking Pen also doesn't gain any benefit unless you're at 2*enemy armour rating. That being said others have said dual-wielding fast, high-pen weapons seems to be the most powerful melee strategy right now.

As much as I liked the sound of down/upgrading Affliction tiers on grazes/crits, I think it's probably better to stick with the duration thing. It's clearer what's going on, and something like your Paralyze spell grazing to an Immobilize would feel almost as bad as when we didn't have grazes in the first place, since the spell isn't doing what you wanted it to.

I wonder if Untroubled Faith is still in. Maybe it's a higher level ability now.

Xaurip Priests and Engwithan Saints actually have ranged staff weapons that shoot fire and ice, respectively. Would actually be kinda annoyed if we couldn't one for ourselves, even if it is just a modified Rod.

An idea I had was allowing Black Jackets to use weapon modals across weapon types, e.g., using the hatchet modal with a mace.

I believe they said they were going back to the drawing board on this a while ago, then Josh tweeted that picture of a Fighter tree with like a billion passives and saying all classes will be getting more passives. I assume that's how they're addressing this.

It's pretty much the same, though I feel like the higher difficulties aren't quite as aggressive with the number of enemies, even relative to the smaller party size.

This looks pretty nice, though it looks like only the companions you have with you are available to look at in the screen, so I hope there's a way to view your standing with companions not with you at the time.

Per-rest spells felt best in PoE when I played them in the way I assume was intended - i.e., using spells conservatively throughout a level to win fights efficiently with minimal loss of Health, and resting when that ran out. The problem is a non-trivial amount of players (from what I've seen and heard both from forums and dev comments) instinctually horde spells (like I used to) or just rest spam. I don't know how you could guide players into the "intended" playstyle without it seeming forced. So I wouldn't be opposed to Priests, Druids and Wizards going to a mana-esque system. I feel like they'd need some gimmicks to set them apart from each other, though, like Ciphers and Chanters have, whether that's how they can use their resource or how they can build it.

The good: Multiclassing and subclasses are cool (most of them anyway) The expanded skills are really good for RP New scripted interaction system seems very strong; cool that you can do stuff like select any ability with the "Fire" tag to burn something, for example Stealth system is fun Much prefer the resource-based system to the X per-encounter abilities Companion help for stat checks The Afflictions/Inspirations system is neat, especially the countering between them I like Armor/Pen as it is now and think it'll work better at higher levels than DR did, though the people who care to dive deeper into the numbers may have their concerns. The mixed: World map exploration is pretty good right now but can feel tedious, especially when it can take 12 in-game hours to reach some small alcove that gives you 5 berries (understand that Josh said this is being worked on). Taking the time to explore an island that just gives you some generic items with no other interactions or story to it also feels bad. It's cool that my casters can actually cast every fight now,, but it can make fights feel really repetitive. Ship duels can be exciting, once I watched some videos on how you're supposed to do it, but managing ship resources seems like it could get pretty tedious in the actual game. Affliction nerfs: it's fine for hard CC to not be gamebreaking, but it feels like there should be some more effect to them. I feel like somewhere between -10 to -20 to, say, Deflection and Reflex for Paralyze/Stun is pretty reasonable, for example. Having some of the non-CC Afflictions reduce defenses as well would also help I think The NPC schedules seem pretty limited right now, though I guess that might be beta roughness. I like the idea of schools of magic, but it seems hard to make a specific character type with some the Wizard subclasses Perception for detecting traps/secrets is good, though I feel having high Mechanics should still contribute to that The bad: I liked the Accuracy buff/Defense debuff juggle of PoE combat, and I feel like that's less present in Deadfire. Fewer accuracy buffs (which I'm aware is intentional), and you seem to have to use a spell that specifically reduces Defense rather than an Affliction to do it, related to what I just said about Afflictions. Lack of passives/general talents, though I know this is being worked on Empower doesn't feel like a good replacement for per-rest abilities; feels very video-gamey, though using it in combat can still be interesting The Black Jacket subclass just seems pretty bad Still prefer Health to Injuries

Hands of Light sounds fine to me, but there's a passive called Divine Purpose which is a bit weird since Paladins aren't (necessarily) religious here. I'd also probably swap Holy Slayer and Zealot around.

Have you guys who've played with caster speed mods posted your experience with them in the beta forums? If not, might be worth doing so to get some dev notice on them.

There's a dodge animation, which is nice. Unfortunately no shield block or parry animations that I've noticed. I always liked the blocks in Dragon Age: Origins since it always came with a satisfying "clang!" sound, but they never fired often enough.

Good news from the stream, cancelling your own spell/ability/item consumption before it's done won't consume the resource.

I will admit I didn't really have a proper go at it, but I had little idea of what was going on and it seemed tedious. I probably wouldn't mind it being more abstracted unless it's really easy to skip entirely. Is there a formal way of fleeing a battle? Because I must've spent 5 rounds just running away trying to do that.

When it said "1 passive ability point and 1 active ability point", I tried to purchase both an active and a passive, but I only had the one point to spend.

I tried to do that and it didn't work.

Mark Brown also has a great video on systems based stories vs. branching narratives: