Daidre

Honestly, I never seen a point in acquiring deep knowledge about POE systems. I mean, they are result of long and hard work of experienced game designer with a dream to make his own D&D that was coded into computer game by people who had really vague ideas about how it should work. Add bug infestation and consequent months of patching on top and results are mind boggling. Stacking rules are convoluted mess. Nothing works the way any rational person expect it to work. Lashes on weapon do not work like lashes from chanter. They affect some character damage sources but ignore others. Different dots either stack, prolong or replace each other. You can never say without testing whether some bonus multiplicative or additive. Double dipping negative multiplier make any penalties more severe then they seem. Some acc bonuses stack, some are not but there is no strict typing like in D&D. Take grazes for example. They where invented to avoid binary hit/miss from D&D and defended ad nauseam as concept on this very forum. But then some new people ask for TB, get it and start to whine how annoying it is to miss all the time or do pathetic damage. Obsidian solution: lets remove grazes from the TB! completely. Or spell grazes. They were a big thing in first POE so spells rarely completely wasted, but in Deadfire they are no longer exits, so all spell Accuracy calculation is different branch of rules comparing to usual attacks. I think this is main reason why POE character building was never as popular like for D&D games. You can easily find tons of old forums about builds for NWN or NWN 2 but all POE experts are here. There are about dozen of people by my rough estimate (in good days) and they are mostly busy with singing praises to one another and attacking anyone who dares criticize their brilliant game.

I guess Hours vs Tidefall heavily depends on party composition too. Closest thing to tank I have in this part of game is 2-weapon wielding Eder and auto hard-CC in AOE from Barb worth a lot more for me than additional DPS. And it could be pretty reliable with priest buffs - I was knocking down adult drakes with this proc on lvl 5-6 more often then not on the way to Drake that sits on Tidefall. P.S. I adore Huana dresses. And brigantine is ok on girls, but it is was Eder who was wearing it. Seeing him in chain skirt is bit to much for me(

I hate naked knees in Reckless Brigantine. AFAIR hide armor have them too. Only thing I can look at when I see char wearing it. You say it like I'd waste my party slot on Rogue. And my priest running into melee with greatsword is last thing I need in life on PotD. And I am not a dude(((

@Tidefall But it is not only overbearing. Both Hours and Tall Grass Grass has knockdown. Char with 2-hander is usually barb and he will be horrible penalized with low INT to speed up dot. And on crit procs crazy in his hands. Tall Grass also has hit to crit conversion and reach that is priceless for me in crowded melee. I would ranked Tidefall behind both of them as sum of properties, but this is where I usually run out of hands to hold 2-handers even in early game. It is also bad on more fragile chars because I despise rest spam and they lose HP too fast without reach. So my first superior weapon usually ends up dead weight in party stash. Some times, in the hands of paladin who not fountain of DPS on low level. And dot that requires 3 INT to shine (I play without mercs and even Eder is not this stupid) not good enough to change that. And I spent 1.2k - 1.5k hours on first POE if it is only thing you care about in people opinions.

@Tidefall: but target needs to be alive for dot to be active and make noticeable difference. In realty, most enemies you can reliably hit will not live long enough even on PotD for all this extra DPS to be applied and instant +0.5 crit outperforms.

But they kinda make discussion about getting endgame weapon on low level bit pointless. You do not need to kill any lizards for it no matter how non-trivial it is.

Why so much fuss about mediocre Tidefall? Hours of St. Rumbalt and Tall Grass are much better 2-handers and both sold nearby. You don't even need to fight anything to buy them.

But POE has enough challenge even for experienced player with all hard CC thrown at you. Deadfire on PotD is so easy that difference between amazingly inventive build and not-intentionally botched character is minimal is the hand of any player who understands how attack bonus, armor and defenses work. Even on first run when all your metagaming knowledge comes from first POE. It is game where you need respec to change available spells of your cleric/druid! Or you never need it because there are 1-2 not useless spells on every PL. There is brilliant character building in the Deadfire but and it mostly excel exercise without any practical application. Add rogue or monk to any martial and he will start blowing everything up in sea of damage with couple of buffs casted by prepared AI. Program paladin to heal him with <50% HP and it will take megaboss to actually wake up and start playing the game.

I think loot is rather good in the Deadfire comparing to a lot of modern day RPG. There is also unparalleled synergy with character builds. But topic starter hit level cap pretty early and it completely destroyed any difficulty this game has. When most of your fights end after "left click and wait 30s" all cool legendary weapons tend to look the same. Encounter design was my main issue - only Fampyrs pose any danger until you figure them out, but most of the endgame fights is too tame for lvl 20 party.

It really surprised me in finale. All factions were more or less equal in good/bad things in their politics and then Ruatai suddenly tells me: go drown one city block in blood while we bomb civilians in another. And I was "What?! Are you crazy, no sane person will agree to do this." It was like writer decided to tell me: No matter they are right about incompetent Huana leadership that hurts its own citizens more then helps. No matter they have a point about how stupid it is to mine Luminous Adra. They are bad! Militaristic countries are bad! Invasions are bad! Look how bad they truly are! With same level of subtlety.

I am playing Might and Magic 6 now and enjoy it more then anything in Deadfire ever (Was desperately trying to play DLC I payed for week ago but dropped it again). You cant even imagine how horrible my RPG tastes are.

Yes, I am horribly biased against people who wrote Xoti and Tekehu and then posted on twitter how proud they are of their work. Even more biased against people who decided to put biggest parts of game plot on picture slides with wordy descriptions and wrote this descriptions.

Hey, it is matter of taste. For me Deadfire is like special kind of torture - tons of boring and completely useless info about characters/setting written in purple prose and voiced with yet another bad accent. Every NPC talks x3 more than he should with zero actual impact on story or gameplay. And there is not enough dungeons, fun combat and C&C to suffer it for. I would be more forgiving if it was first game but after NWN 2: Mask of Betrayer and even more recent White March it is just embarrassing. I hope Microsoft will hire this people good editor who will cut all "high philosophy beyond understanding of weak minds" out of texts so I'll have usual RPG routine where every word counts and matters. Or will kick out half of them and hires game designers so game was not turning into visual novel for hours of time. So, maybe my tastes is horrible, but I prefer texts with actual info in them and not detrimental to game pacing in their quantity. I read high literature when I want high literature and no attempts for it from yesterday students and twitter stars who have more brilliant ideas and political opinions than common sense.

I enjoyed all Obsidian writing until Deadfire happened. Especially in KOTOR 2 and Alpha Protocol. P:K is not even close to it and never will be. My love to this game is for combat, dungeon crawling and amazing character building that comes with D&D derivative system. And I really, really love D&D. I do not replay RPGs for hundreds of hours to enjoy their questionable literature quality, I barely pay attention to it when things like Xoti are not pushed into my face. My problem with Deadfire that she and Teheku are pushed into my face (could replace then with mercs) and there is so much talking and info-damping for every little adventure/combat that replay is not attractive. But first run was disappointing too because main plot and companion quests are so short. And, since it was early version, lot of quests were hellishly bugged and end boss never appeared.

What development Serafen and Maya have? They both go though similar "maybe Principi/Ruatai is not perfect" moment in last quest dialogue but they never had a chance to show it beside end slides. Their reactions never change - both still massively disapprove PC for any bad word about their faction. I still shudder from disgust remembering Xoti abusing hem of my Watcher shirt or Tekehu with "look into his big black (fish!) eyes". Maya with best of the best sniper comes to mind too. I have less issues with quality of writing for others but huge problem with quantity.

Eder is definitely snarky and endlessly cute with his animal-loving thing. He is still my favorite person in all POE. Pity that Aloth is suddenly duty-obsessed in Deadfire. I do not count sidekicks because they are barely more then character concepts.

In P:K it starts as cliché but does have interesting turns and subverting in later chapters. But in Deadfire you can see everything person is right in introduction dialog for most companions. There is no surprises and very little character development. Plus, reading Deadfire dialogues I can't stop noticing how try-hard writer was to make character look cool/snarky/cute. Take any POE 2 party member and he always has at least 2 of this 3 qualities.

POE1 by huge margin, especially with White March. I was so excited on Deadfire release by all new class options and multi classes but game was huge disappointment for me. I was designing one build after another but there is no content to throw at them - no proper dungeon crawling, no attrition and difficulty was still pathetic casual-friendly last time I played it in August with BoW. I have more than 1k hours logged in POE 1, but thought of getting through Neketaka again with all walls of text and tiny portions of actual gameplay here and there completely killed my desire to play Deadfire even with new DLC content. Writing is another pet peeves of mine. I liked most of companions in POE but I never expected to see anyone so obnoxious like Xoti or Teheku in Obsidian game. This two just do not shut up about how special they are and everyone else are stuck like broken record on 1-2 topics they only speak about (for example Pallegina and Vallian Republics). I played POE on and off for years but I skipped Deadfire right to Pathfinder: Kingmaker which is head above everything I hoped to see one day from Obsidian (and got text ship battles and 4 hours long main plot).

I always gather all sea exploration XP right after leaving fort Maje getting to level 7-8. I probably sabotage my own enjoyment from low lvl content, but it is really difficult to stop myself. Then I steal all amazing things from Neketaka shops and go to forum to whine how easy game is

I do not understand why they remade the system so much in Deadfire, because I liked it a lot more at the last iteration in White March 2. But in Deadfire they took all my favorite classes: Cipher, Priest, Berserker, Druid, Wizard - and systematically destroyed everything that was fun about them. Encounter design and difficulty took a huge drop after WM 2 too. My AI scripts, written in May 2018, was murdering they way through upscaled PoTD in BoW with barely any input from me.

Afaik Deadfire DLCs was made secondary (I do not want to offend anyone here) writing team. And I am kinda hopeful for FS because my experience with BoW was more favorable comparing to original game - my last run was at beginning of September (and final boss hadn't spawned that soured me a lot). It looked like writers of BoW spent more effort on telling a good story than trying to look smart with all pseudo-philosophy and long words they found in the dictionary. It was similar with White March - my personal favorite in all POE. Writing there is very concise, lore-rich and, most important, never overstayed its welcome between adventuring. Before P:K it was closest thing to BG and Icewind Dale I have seen in years.

All my pledging ended up with Obsidian having enough value to sell themselves to Microsoft. It will take a miracle now to see POE 3 in any form resembling 1&2. 3 Years after I would be happy to be wrong about it.

I am so harsh about sidekicks for mostly one reason: You meet Ydwin who is first animancer companion in the series and damn interesting one too, but she is a sidekick. Than you look at Xoti and think - they cut Ydwin but wasted time and money to make this. With complete voice-over. And romance! They could extend Vatnir or even Rekke as cleric of unknown religion but Xoti is all we got.

Comparing P:K and Deadfire in terms of companion quests just ridiculuous. P:K has 11 companions with 2-4 quest long lines and easily x5 content. Not all of it perfect or even good, with noticable outliners like Jubilost and Nok-Nok who is amazing and Octavia & Regongar on mediocre-to-fanfiction level. And Deadfire has 7 companions with quests that are... beyond dissapointing. It is only one for every character without any unique locations. Outliners are: - Tekehu, no personal quest but ton of plot/faction involvement. - Aloth, close to nonexistent. - Maya/Xoti quests with glorious "do not care what you telling me I am right and you are wrong" finales. Only thing I could see playing them was image of Obsidian team over spreadsheet with "How much to cut to diminish our losses" header. Oh, there is also a sidekicks but whoever came up with idea should be fired.

Russian version is not better per se, it just bad in different places . Of course, I am biased, but I love how two most prominent Strong Female Characters in P:K both stupid as bricks. And i am too russian to believe that it is unintentional.