Arnegar
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Posts posted by Arnegar
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Making speed less valuable could be accomplished just fine by simply reducing the amounts gained from dexterity, items and buffs. Instead we've gone from one problematic extreme to the other. Initiative is of so little value that I'd strongly consider making dex the dump stat du jour. Often I don't even want to act first on the opening round because enemy positioning makes it awkward to do anything but stand back and let them come to the location you chose to fight in. After the first turn, it pretty much stops mattering who acts first. If anything, it's actually better to have your party's turns all at the same time so you can time everything right instead of your turns mixing with enemy turns. As long as you only get one action per round, there's a strategic advantage to stacking your party's turns all in sequence. I routinely use the delay turn button for that reason, meaning everything that affects initiative is 100% worthless to me.
Too many of this game's mechanics revolve around action- and recovery speed. Making these stats useless is just too much of a balance upset. If it was a pretty niche thing that wasn't affected by very many things, it would be different, but there's just too many items, abilities and build factors designed around speed. This new action economy system is more primitive than Fallout 1. For all the problems with the RTwP speed system, eliminating speed is a much worse alternative. It's not right that you can have two characters that are identical except one has max dex and one has 3, and they'll perform pretty much the same. That's not better than before where speed was a bit too important.
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It's a bit absurd that this frankly gamebreaking bug still exists. It's been months now. There's been a full version update since it got reported and it wasn't fixed. Ship combat becomes borderline impossible with this bug, and all we know is that the report hasn't been closed? Having no control for the first five seconds of the already absurdly stacked ship combat (15+ enemies) makes it a total cluster**** as AI will cause your party to essentially suicide by charging into insane, unrecoverable positions. This is a major bug and it just sits there in a report.
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Arcane Archer seems truly awful, like worse than basic no-subclass ranger. The imbued shots aren't very good and you can use so few of them per encounter that it doesn't come close to compensating for the accuracy and health penalties. They don't really scale with the ranger passives and they're just lower-level wizard spells, not even unique abilities. Pretty disappointing. It feels like ten minutes of thought went into the making of this class. At a bare minimum, the bond cost of the spells needs to be halved so you can actually use them more than two or three times per fight. Then get rid of the accuracy penalty and you might be looking at a class worth playing, mostly because the other ranger subclasses present such weak competition.
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Are you adding it to the top rows? That's where they actually consume it from. If you just put it in the bigger inventory box, it isn't used.
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Shieldbearer of Ecwhatever is way better than the tiny AoE heal from Kind Wayfarer. Rendering targets immortal for 6+intel% seconds is so much more valuable. The sheer mileage you get out LoHing somebody and leaving them unkillable for eight seconds is miles beyond what 15ish heal to two or three nearby characters will accomplish. It's not even close.
Often, the character you LoH as a shieldbearer will continue to receive damage and could soak up 50-100 or more damage that would otherwise have killed them moments after the LoH lands. Enemies will continue to attack the character in question, so the effective healing of a Shieldbearer LoH can end up in the hundreds.
This isn't WoW where rendering someone invulnerable will cause enemies to stop attacking them. When a Shieldbearer LoHs a target, they simply cannot die for the duration of the buff. You could chain it on the same target to let them soak up all the damage for the duration of a fight. It's a candidate for a nerf. Kind Wayfarer is not.
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I prefer to get character to 12 mechanics, and the remainder in athletics for the self-heal, then another character gets 7 mechanics for the +4 party assist bonus. That'll sort out everything. From what I've seen, nothing requires more than 18 and you can use lockpicks for those when you're at 16. If you're stingy, you can stay at 10 on the main mechanics guy and rely on Thief's Putty for the 18 locks. You can even stay at 8 with the +2 mechanics gloves. In short, 18 is as much as you should ever need, and 7 mechanics will give +4 party assist so the main mechanics guy needs 12 without bonuses. I prefer to ignore the gloves and putty and just raise the skill to 12 on one char and 7 on another.
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Yeah, you don't see it in the character sheet unless it's a completely plain "+x deflection." It still applies as stated in the tooltip.
I'm not sure how the AI interprets conditional deflection effects, though. Plain effects will affect their behaviour by making them less liable to attack someone with high deflect, and I suspect that it goes by the value displayed in the character sheet. This would mean that Arcane Veil does not make you a less juicy target, even though it gives +50 deflect against almost everything. This can be good or bad depending on whether or not you want to be attacked.
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Paladin (Shieldbearer) / Chanter (Troubadour)
Dump perception and constitution; max intelligence, strength and resolve. Now you've got a character who can just stand around between the front and back lines to intercept anyone who runs past. You don't want this character on the front line both because the low con leaves them a bit frail and because you want them to be able to reach everyone with Lay on Hands.
Don't dump dexterity. If you do, your recovery time after actions is so high that you can't react fast enough. However, set this character's attack AI to passive since they're not going to do any damage anyway and you don't want to busy yourself with recovery time from attacking. They just stand there, blocking the way and healing/buffing people. I don't think it's a worthwhile party member, but this is the way to go if you insist on having a passive healbot.
Chants: the +10 deflection one and then whatever healing-oriented chant you prefer. You just stand there buffing everyone with your chants and popping LoH wherever it's needed. Use your incantations for heals, resurrects or just summons if nothing else is needed. Alternately, you could also dump resolve and max perception for the AoE paralyze incantation and make it a heal/CC bot, but incantations tend to have a short range and you don't want this character to be up front with dumped resolve.
Gear: the AoE heal aura shield from Dark Cupboard, and whatever else. You can put on heavy armor if you didn't dump dex, which means enemies won't so readily beeline for your healbot. You can also choose not to wear heavy armor, which means your heals come out faster when needed, but then this character will need to not have dumped constitution.
For a troubadour, I prefer not using the chant modal so you can fit an extra chant into the rotation will full coverage. It's better to get that passive full-party bonus than to get out extra incantations. However, there may be fights where you need a certain incantation more often and can toggle the modal on.
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Two-handed melee weapons are kind of underpowered. Whispers of the Endless Paths is pretty strong but that's about it. The reason to use two-handers is if you already have a dual-wielder in the party and they're getting the best two weapons, so the next guy in line has to choose between the best two-hander or the third and fourth best one-handers. That's about it. It means 2h can be worth using, but only by association. And if the dual-wielder is a Devoted who has to stick to a single weapon class, odds are that the two-hander only pays off if there are two dual-wielders ahead of him. If you only have two melee attackers in the party and one is a Devoted, the second guy is better off dual-wielding as well with another weapon class.
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It's a good multiclass because the benefits are mostly fire-and-forget, but the class in itself is so bland and inactive. The chants are passive, and you get to cast a pseudo-spell (most of which are weaker than ordinary spells for their level) every 18-24 seconds or something like that. It was the same way in PoE1, but then most classes were pretty simple at that point. The chanter class on its own doesn't lend itself to attacking, all it really brings is your passive chants and then an incantation once or twice per fight. That's pretty miserable design-wise, but it's not underpowered simply because there's a few chants and incantations that are really strong.
Whenever I play a chanter, I find that half my talent points are just put into something arbitrary because there's nothing I'll use in that tier. Most chants are completely useless because you can only actually use one or two at a time, so you never really have a reason to use any but the best one or two chants. Incantations all use the exact same resource which is gained too slowly to really let you use an appreciable variety of them. Feels like incantation costs should go down as you level up so the earlier ones eventually cost 1 and can be used with some measure of regularity instead of just sticking with your best one. That turns the chanter into a class that effectively has one active ability.
Before the second half of the game where everything becomes so easy that nothing matters, the best use of chanters is to sing the regen or +10 deflect song and then do the AoE paralyze incantation on cooldown. Later they can restore resources and stuff, but at that point the game is so trivial that it doesn't even matter. You pretty much choose between Skald for more paralyzes, Beckoner for more summons, or Troubadour for an extra chant coverage. Nothing else is legitimately worthwhile.
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One example is when you have to go back to Fort Deadlight after receiving a letter. FOUR load screens just to talk to an NPC for a moment.
Then there's the myriad places where there's a completely pointless exit, like the Imperial Command place. There's a side exit, and if you leave through it, you go out to these stairs that just go up to the upper level. Load screens both times. What's the point? There are stairs inside. Or the Kahanga palace, there's this balcony off the rooftop that has nothing in it, but it's two load screens if you click on it to have a look. It's just such meaningless waste of time, why are there load screens for these tiny flavor areas?
When playing this game, I just feel like 25% of my time is spent in load screens or NPC-walking-away wait states where you have no control. There's just too much of it. When you travel to the Gullet, there's like a forty second display of some guy getting thrown in the depths, and it's so slow because you have to watch NPCs move around and speak their lines. I'm all for story, but can we not constantly put the game on pause for extended periods of time every few minutes?
Older games had these as well, but they weren't something that happened all the time. We all remember the drudgery of watching Imoen get kidnapped by the wizards in BG2 for the fifteenth time, but then that sort of thing didn't continue to happen every other time you talked to an NPC.
I just travelled from Serpent's Crown to Queen's Berth. On the way, I was interrupted TWICE by storybook events where I had to kill some meaningless bandits who lit a house on fire or bullied one of my crewmates. It made the trek across the city take ten minutes for absolutely no reason. Then I set sail for Crookspur, and in that short trip, first my crew wanted to play dice and then they wanted to know if this fish was okay. It's just not something I want to click through sixty times over the course of a playthrough.
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Casters SUCK in the first third of the game which is where it's actually difficult. They become powerful later on when everything's so trivial that being powerful barely matters. While the endgame's triviality may change when the difficulty issues are addressed, I'm not convinced it will do much to the dynamic of casters early vs. late. I'm sure it'll still be a lot like PoE was: eventually you get to the point where things just aren't hard (though hopefully not quite as total faceroll as PoE2 is now). If the higher-level wizard spells are nerfed, something needs to be done about the fact that they're pure garbage in the beginning where even a max-perception character will routinely miss 80% of their spells.
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Priest is a trash class in PoE2, to be honest. Most of their spells are either single target or have a tiny AoE centered around the caster. They also have long cast times. How am I supposed to buff my whole team with Holy Might when it's a slow cast and has such a small reach that my party has to huddle around the priest? You can't start a fight that way.
The priest has one saving grace: Devotions for the Faithful. This is an overpowered spell on its own, made balanced by the fact that the class offers very little else. Priest healing spells are surprisingly awful, and other classes can supply most of the same inspirations as the priest buffs. You just don't need to rely on slow priest spells for it, my other characters can buff themselves with instant abilities that are as strong as most priest buffs.
Maybe if fights were longer and priests had better healing, it would be a more worthwhile class. As it is, pretty much anything that a priest offers can be done by a paladin who also gets a bunch of way better stuff and a giant bonus to defenses.
With the way buffs don't overlap in this game, a class centered almost entirely around buffs is just not good enough.
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There's just too many of these. The load screens get really long, especially until the memory leak is fixed, and they just happen constantly. You're sailing around and some random lore or ship event happens, you click through the pages, and then there's a load screen afterwards. Moving around a city is 50% load screens.
Half the areas you click in the world map will come up with some storybook script before letting you in. Sometimes it's to let you search for clues or whatever, but one time it was literally just a cave and then it made me choose between "enter the cave" or "turn around." Nothing else. I mean, really? This is just pure pointless tedium and wasted clicks.
Then there's the wait states. You know how, before/after dialogue, the UI disappears and you have to watch the NPC wander away slowly? Often that's ten seconds thrown away for no reason. It just happens a bit too often, so it gets frustrating.
These things have their place, but they're too frequent in this game. They especially overuse the storybook scripts. Often it feels rammed in just for the sake of having it. When I click on a zone exit, I really don't need a book to pop up asking whether I actually wanted to travel there or would rather turn back. I already clicked on the exit.
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For raw damage, fire spells are generally superior because of the ring you can get really early on with +10 accuracy to fire abilities.
This makes Fireball one of the better AoE nukes if you're looking for burst and not a persistent effect or debuff. By level 10, it routinely hits for 200 on targets that aren't resistant/immune to fire. It gets good scaling from power levels due to being a lower-level spell, and it doesn't have some awkward cone that'll hit your allies.
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So I'm trying to figure out what it is that's causing the game to be so easy. Clearly changes are needed, at least for PotD, but which changes? Here are my observations:
- It's not really an accuracy/deflection thing. Those values seem alright. If anything, spellcaster accuracy in the early game is hopeless and doesn't start to become decent until level 6 or so. In the first parts of the game, if you cast an AoE on 5 enemies, the usual outcome is 3x miss and 2x graze. Even with maxed perception.
- It's not the damage done by enemies, either. They hit plenty hard. If you choose to make a squishy wizard with 3 resolve and 7 con or something, he'll get 1-shotted even by trash mobs.
- Most enemies could use some more health. Once you get to level 10 or so, you just mow down entire groups of dudes in seconds. Also there's some weird situations in places where enemies have 1 health for some reason.
- Enemies use oddly little crowd control. I find that I almost never get hit with hard CC. This used to be a big danger in PoE1, but here it barely happens. Maybe it's because of these resistance mechanics that downgrade effects to something less.
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I think priest is the worst. While wizards are a bit dull now, they still have a lot of great spells and evokers can do insane damage. Rangers aren't that great but they can still do good damage. But priests are just so crap, aside from one spell: Devotions for the Faithful. This single spell is pretty much the only reason to bring a priest. Their spells have such long cast times and usually small AoE that it's hard to make use of them. I mean really, if an in-combat buff with a 3s cast time requires the party to literally stand in a huddle around the caster, it's just not usable.
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A lot of things become unavailable at night. Shops close, quest NPCs go to bed, etc. What's the point of this? What purpose does it serve? Surely a game like this doesn't need to be that simulationist. That level of realism is not present in most aspects of Pillars of Eternity.
There's a few occasions where it has its place. When you need to find some thugs that only come out at night, I'm cool with that. But when shops close up, trading company doors lock etc. during the night, it goes a bit too far.
You can't rest in the city. You can't choose to wait x hours. What usually happens is you spend minutes to some place to turn in a quest, realize that it's closed for the night, and then spend twice that long running to the nearest tavern to rest and then return in the daytime. Nothing is accomplished by this. There's no roleplay, no meaningful atmosphere to be gained. It's just a pointless consumption of time.
Please don't disable shops and quest NPCs during times of day when there's no option to wait in place.
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Priest is just such an awful class. Devotions for the Faithful is an overpowered spell, but that's pretty much the only thing of any value that priests get. Their healing is garbage, most of their buffs are either single-target or have such a tiny AoE that they aren't usable, and they don't get enough fast-casting spells. I end up taking a priest along just for DftF and the Arcane Veil that Wael priests get, and the rest of the character is just the other half of its multiclass. Now and then I'll cast Suppress Affliction as well but it's not enough to count.
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It's a bit difficult to make an off-tank that's actually sturdy and also does real damage unless it's a paladin. The 20 deflect you get for free from Deep Faith is just so strong, it means you don't really have to care about resolve. Devoted/Bleakwalker is the perfect OT/bruiser for this reason. It can be another paladin subclass as well, Goldpact is nice if you want to focus more on tanking than DPS.
There are other classes that do more damage, but they don't have an easy time getting to 70-80 unbuffed deflect like a paladin will. If what you want is a literal OT/bruiser and not just a melee DPS, it's probably the only way to do it without some weird, situational build or one that relies on a buff setup that you have to micromanage for every fight.
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Evoker is solid for pure damage, but then you're not really getting a traditional wizard, you're just getting a damage dealer. I mean, you can still cast some of the other spell schools, but it just feels weird to use them with penalties. As such, evoker is just a DPS character. If you get the +10 fire accuracy ring, it's definitely legit DPS. If you go nature godlike, it's insane how much damage a spell can do. I've had Fan of Flames crit for like 150 when my wizard was level three. In one of my parties, the evoker has twice as much damage done as the ranger even though I'm often lazy with him and just shoot my rod in easier fights. It's also one of the few classes that feels like it's truly worth single-classing.
Chill Fog is such a broken spell that it's difficult to justify a wizard that can't cast it, but once you get up in levels a bit, you really start to appreciate the extreme AoE burst of the evoker. With the nature godlike bonus, the amulet that gives a power level buff once per rest and an empowered spell, you can clear a while pack of enemies in one cast if you don't get grazes. That's really valuable and I don't think any other class gets that kind of AoE damage.
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The ranger subclasses are just riddled with heavy penalties, to the point where I don't feel like taking any of them. It's even worse than wizards who at least get major bonuses in exchange for their substantial penalties. And the pet is a giant hassle and liability, bonded grief is such a severe debuff.
Sharpshooter gets a recovery penalty that mitigates the damage bonuses. The -10 deflection is harsh as well. Unless you invest a bunch of points into resolve (again counteracting the damage bonus), you're gonna have like 10 deflection or something and every enemy will make a beeline for you. It's just not worthwhile to have a character with a permanent -10 deflection penalty unless you're playing on a lower difficulty cheesing your way through the game somehow.
Ghost Heart gets no actual bonuses and is pure garbage. You get to not suffer a debuff when your pet dies, but you have to spend time summoning it in every fight and it has a duration. I'd almost consider taking this subclass and not bothering to summon a pet, just to get the ranger abilities without having to deal with the bonded grief debuff. But it's not like that's actually worthwhile.
Stalker is really strong on paper, but the amount of micromanagement you have to do to always stay within 7m of your pet will drive a level-headed man insane after a few hours. There's no pet AI option to have it stay close to you, so you have to constantly babysit this character. 7m is like half the range of a bow. It literally doesn't make sense that you start to suffer grief as soon as your pet moves further away from you than you could throw a chair. That's to say nothing of the 4m distance you need to maintain in order to actually get the bonus.
The main issue is that the pet simply isn't good enough to warrant this burden. If you invest several skill points into pet-related passives, it starts to become vaguely okay, but then you could probably have gained even more damage from some other class. You could make a very strong Devoted/Brute archer, for instance. These days, most games that have a class with a permanent pet let you choose a setup that forgoes the pet in favor of some passive buff, and this game frankly needs something like that.
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Think about it like this: would you take a passive that just gives a permanent +3.3 might? If the character is a damage dealer, the answer usually yes. The cost is pretty low in most cases, the alternative would have been some second-level cipher spell when you already have the two best ones. Is +10% damage better than the third best cipher spell from the second tier? Unless your character is a pure controller, it probably is.
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Devoted/Skald is kind of crazy. You're just spamming AoE paralyze and doing solid damage, plus the benefit of whatever chanter song you like best. I made one with low might to keep him a bit tanky and he still does like 75% of the damage that my single class all-damage evoker does while keeping entire groups of enemies paralyzed and serving as a sturdy enough front-liner. The AoE paralyze incantation costs 2 phrases on a Skald, so enemy melees barely get a chance to act. It's my most effective character.
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The Turn-Based Combat Tactics, Strategies, and Builds Thread
in Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire Characters Builds, Strategies & the Unity Engine (Spoiler Warning!)
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I found turn-based to be a big drop in difficulty, too. Not sure what the exact reason is, it's just plain easier. I think a big part of it is the fact that enemies behave differently and will stop in front of your tanks much more readily instead of pouring right past to cuddle your casters. At level 9 now, my druid has taken literally 0 damage. Every fight just pans out the same: combat starts, every enemy runs up and starts hitting my two tanks, and then I calmly kill them with my damage dealers while the bad guys miss and graze the tanks. In RTwP, getting things to stay on your tanks is a much bigger hassle and you routinely have to use doorways and other bottlenecks. In TB they seem to just stick to whomever they first make contact with.