protopersona

I'm really curious to know what havoc this is going to play with mods.

What's marmite?

PoE1, and Pathfinder: Kingmaker. What else? Being a fan of this particular genre (and essentially no other genre), I'd be happy to know. "Several" surely implies more than two. Sword Coast Legends? Edit: strange. I tried to find it on Steam to see what people are talking about it and it doesn't show up in the search. Am I spelling it wrongly? You can't find it because it was removed from stores back in Dec 2017. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sword_Coast_Legends

For me almost everything you're asking for would just become tedious busy work you have to juggle. The combat is what a lot of people are here for, with dialog and plot being a secondary concern. All that other stuff is just annoyances I don't want in the way of what I'm playing for.

You take that back. Equilibrium is an amazing cinematic experience. It was pretty silly. Come on. Silly does not invalidate awesomeness.

Yes, now is a pretty good time. I think all the major changes have been shaken out by this point and PotD is in a good spot now if that's the route you want to go.

You take that back. Equilibrium is an amazing cinematic experience.

To me a major patch is a feature patch. Fixing bugs and issues is a minor patch. So it wouldn't be the last patch, just the last big patch.

There is still one more god challenge to be added, and the turn based mode that was leaked with last patch. As Frak mentioned already some elements of the game such as a few new subclasses could use a balance pass as well. I think at least one more major patch is coming.

Yeah, if this was to happen it would be Microsoft trying to sweeten the appeal of the IP for further sequels. MS have more money than they know what to do with (they bought Minecraft because they had billions of dollars sitting overseas that they had no use for). They definitely do not need crowdfunding for the purpose of improving Deadfire.

I love these threads.

The inconsistent wording is definitely confusing and I'm surprised it's there in a legal filing. I'd have preferred them to use nett for receipts after cut and gross for before cut but I'm not an accountant. I don't have much problem with the guy who made the initial calculation being mistaken given most people are familiar with movie or game grosses that include the vendor fees and will thus automatically think that's the case when seeing figures. Journos definitely should have checked though, the agreement is a public filing and they are expected to have better knowledge than a random person on reddit and to be more authoritative sources. It's the age of 24/7 news cycles. You can't afford to wait for research or fact checking otherwise you won't be the first to gather all those clicks/views. I think the music industry is gonna be fine, artists have been making most of their money on live performances and going independent for a long time now. The recording companies and radio networks might be in trouble but oh well. I think it's a similar situation in the publishing industry. The goals haven't changed, just the methods for reaching customers and marketing your product has. Companies have been slow to catch up and still insist on keeping the old profit margins in a world that increasingly can't afford to pay them.

Hell, real journalists from actual journalistic publications are guilty of that now. It's yellow journalism 2.0 since the subscription model has been screwed over thanks to the advent of the "free" internet.

Sounds like you have the Infamous Captain bug. Infamous Captain is supposed to make the enemies cower for a short time at the beginning of combat. Unfortunately it's triggering during the camera flyover and wearing off before you can control your party. So the other crew gets to start wailing into you before your party will even react.

I'm actually disappointed the devs didn't do anything with this. It would have solved so many narative problems for them. Why is the watcher now a level 1 character with a new race and class? Berath reincarnated your hollowborn style husk. Why are your companions also level 1? Well they weren't close enough for Eothas to steal their entire soul, but close enough for him to severely weaken it. Just a few lines acknowledging this vaguely would have done wonders for the continuity of the 2 games.

So it looks like you set your ability bar to not show in the options>interface menu. If that's not the case you've got a genuine bug on your hands. If the options menu doesn't fix it I'd verify my game files.

If you ask the author of this mod on Nexus he's pretty responsive to making optional versions of companions. https://www.nexusmods.com/pillarsofeternity2/mods/72

Can you really blame us? The main thrust of your argument boils down to "yes wizards are powerful, but they aren't guaranteed to take off large chunks of enemy health bars with every cast of a damage spell." This game is built around needing to buff and debuff on the hardest difficulty, especially your accuracy. That doesn't mean your wizard has to be the one doing the buffs\debuffs. NPCs can do that job too. If you don't feel like that's the way things should work you're barking up the wrong tree here. Your desires would drastically change how the game plays, and I don't think cool explosions are worth that.

From the searching I've been able to do level scaling disables the quest difficulty indicators, and has since at least last May.

Nope. I want ludicrous speed. "They've gone to plaid!"

This is a behavior in people I just don't understand, and it crops up in everything. "Keep things new and interesting, but don't change anything." It's like no one even sees the inherent paradox. I get the sentiment behind it, they want to feel like they did the first time the experienced something. Except you can't get that feeling back. Chasing the dragon of nostalgia never works.

Path makes its money off of a *very* good itemization system for its genre and a clever economic system to supplement it. It also has an excessively complicated character build system that, while not great design in a vacuum, does some smart things that crucially work well with their core itemization and reward loops. On the other hand, its gameplay is trash. The industry has gotten way better at this but Path's gameplay would have been amateurish even 20 years ago. The D3 vs Path is a really interesting case because D3 failed so hard on its itemization and economy that they had to totally reboot the game to try and save it. It was a shame, because so many other elements of D3 just dunk on Path so hard, but in that genre itemization and reward loops *are* the game, and where Path nailed it D3 sh*t the bed. And I never played the original, I only came in after the reboot. After the auction house was gone the game was rebalanced and became a lot of fun to play in my opinion. Only with the endless pursuit of higher greater rift levels did the game become boring for me. i did a search for 'pathfinder tier list' and this was the first thing that came up. quoted below: like i dont know pathfinder as well as some folk, but ive got enough experience with ad&d and 3.x that this wasnt a surprise. primacy of casters in that system has been a meme for as long as i can remember. arguing against it is... well it aint a challenge id want to take up, and i aint short of contrary tendencies. there are plenty of high level spells in d&d that can be ignored on a successful save, and due to d&d crit mechanics u got a flat 5% chance of failure thanks to possibility of even weakest foe rolling natural 20, thats not even taking into account things like improved evasion, slippery mind, epic resilience, and whatever contingencies an enemy mage might have prepared. there are also plenty of resistances not readily telegraphed. u could chuck out wail of the banshee only to find out ur targets packing a ring of death ward. like ur saying poe's spell casting is too unreliable and should be shifted in line with a system that is... *more* random and unforgiving? i dont get it. part of the fun of d&d is that every attempt at something is anxiety-inducing, rather than a given, and u get to laugh at that one sucker who keeps rolling under 5 on a d20. So what about the tiers? Are you hung up on the "perfect balance" as well? This is not an mmo guys, but a game about RP. Why don't you check out the P:K builds and see that there are plenty of builds for every class - no class is overshadowed gameplay-wise. Most spells are only partially resisted - wotb is a instant killing spell and these spells have a trade off - they are pretty likely to be completely resisted. That's like one school of spells. In P:K most of these spells also have a damage which will happen even if it gets resisted. And what is your point that a rare piece of gear could negate it? If anything, PoE's spell casting is more reliably... useless, with greater casting times, expendable concetration and weak spells. A spell graze cripples a spell and on most occasions is worse than an enemy succeeding at a saving throw - not to mention that enemy saving throws are far more forgiving than defenses on high level enemies or that spells actually have meaningful damage numbers. Here are the forgiving and not-random-at-all PoE percentages... So you might want to decide what the case is about spell-casting classes. If they were so "unreliable and unforgiving" in DnD, why are they "tier 1"? Ah, now we've gotten to the core of things. You don't care if other classes feel like a subjective waste of space, you don't care about if non-caster classes are viable. You just want magic to be the overpowered empowerment fantasy you're used to. To hell with game balance, roleplaying a demi-god is way more important. /s Look, you want to die on the hill that magic needs to feel amazingly powerful, be my guest. You need your empowerment fantasy, then go for it. Go play the game that gives you that, cause this game isn't it, and I'm glad it's not. Personally I prefer MMO style balance. I prefer that I don't have to regret that I chose something because it looked interesting, but takes forever to kill anything because the game had to take into account the almost godlike powers of 1 class. I prefer that all classes are meant be equally viable in their roles, and only differ in the mechanics of how they fulfill that. I love that there are party roles in the first place, something AD&D and Pathfinder spectacularly fail at delivering since they weren't designed with clear party roles in mind. I especially love that almost nothing in Pillars is a complete waste of your experience points since even a subjective trap choice has niche uses, unlike a lot of the bloated systems in 3.5 and Pathfinder. Wizard is already the most versatile class in the game, able to fill multiple roles in a party with almost no investment in specializing. The way this game is designed that makes them powerful. It's not 'blow up a hundred troops with a snap of my fingers' power, but it's power nonetheless.

Maybe unifying spells and attacks shouldn't have happened in the first place. Diablo 3 did push magic closer to weapons - Want to cast powerful spells? Equip a huge weapon! Path of Exile didn't. Path of Exile defeated Diablo 3. Perhaps bringing magic and weapons closer isn't the way to go. Path defeated Diablo 3? In what way? Cause I have my doubts that Path made more money, which is the only metric that ultimately matters. It's a better game of that type. I imagine some people like, i dunno, players, care about that. That's rather subjective. I enjoyed Diablo 3 way more that Path. Too much grinding, drops way too much trash loot, and too many trap choices that are far more difficult to correct than it needs to be. Personally I'm enjoying Grim Dawn now.

Maybe unifying spells and attacks shouldn't have happened in the first place. Diablo 3 did push magic closer to weapons - Want to cast powerful spells? Equip a huge weapon! Path of Exile didn't. Path of Exile defeated Diablo 3. Perhaps bringing magic and weapons closer isn't the way to go. Path defeated Diablo 3? In what way? Cause I have my doubts that Path made more money, which is the only metric that ultimately matters.

So if I understand correctly, the major complaint Bleak has about the magic system in PoE is that magic should feel important. That every cast should do something with a measurable impact and never have a chance to just miss. See, to me that makes casters more important than martial classes. Casters would have a built in guarantee that they will be effective, whereas martial classes would have to be built around being effective and closing up their limitations. My first question under that line of thinking would be "Other than a tank why would I ever want to take a martial class over a caster?" Guaranteed accuracy and all or nothing defense rolls are fine in a PnP setting. The DM (ideally) is there to ensure that even if the dice send things off the rails they can still bring things back on track and let the players have a good experience. The DM also ensures that the players don't have the option to just rest after every fight, forcing casters to ration out their resources. In a video game though, where a mindless computer is running things? I just feels swingy and unbalanced. There were lots of situations in the BG games where a single saving throw meant I might as well reload my save because I was going to lose. It also made me feel like if I wasn't resting often I was just wasting potential. Regardless of whether I liked all of that, I'd be an idiot to not have casters because of how stupidly powerful they became over martial classes. Personally I like that casters are not inherently better than more mundane options. I like that they need to actually aim things just like the rest of us mortals. I like that magic is just one flavor for dealing with the game's challenges. I especially like that I'm not penalized if I choose to say **** it, magic can go to hell, all martial party here I come! Obsidian's focus in this series seems to have been on trying to make everything viable without any choice overshadowing another. It's a hard line to balance, and they could still tweak it in places. In the end I think it's a much better goal than sticking with tradition. I have to question if casters are truly as weak as you make them out to be Bleak. Honestly my first instinct is a bit of confirmation bias combined with a resistance to shoring up the character's accuracy needs. Yeah, PotD is hard with tons of inflated defenses. If you're having a single character debuff defenses and cast nukes in a party setting I don't see that as a good use of party synergy. If you're trying to play solo, well solo reinforces cheese tactics because it's not the way the devs intend for the game to be played. They don't take away the option for it, but they aren't balancing the game around it either.