Novem

In my opinion (note that in my time with the beta I've only used the Arquebus so I don't know if other guns have been effected), I don't like how fast guns have been made. They feel at least to me faster than they did in the first game and I'd actually like this change reverted. In the first game, I really liked how firearms played a unique niche in combat. They were incredibly slow, but they did a lot of damage when you fired and most importantly they had a much better chance of interrupting the enemy. I understand that due to the theme of the game, you want guns to feel more powerful (especially considering that they were underpowered in the first game), but I don't want that to be done in a way that makes guns feel like bows. If you want to make guns more powerful, I think that numbers should be adjusted to further develop the niche of firearms. That would be, high damage, high interruption rate, and also maybe high accuracy. Making them fast actually in my opinion invalidates the fantasy of using a gun rather than deepening it. I'd like to know other people's opinions on this matter. I'm not too deep in on the actual balance stuff (I also only used the Arquebus) so I'm not sure whether or not I'm on the right track on this issue. But I do think that in my opinion, the bow should be fast firing and more DPS-oriented, while firearms should be more directed to slow, high-impact, and support-oriented.

I don't want the spellcasting to be faster. I think it's perfect how it is right now. What needs to be adjusted is the impact of the spells, not the speed. Rewarding good positioning and smart spell-use is a great way to solve the problems inherent in a per-encounter system (spells need to be made underpowered for balance) and a per-rest system (spells need to be conserved unnecessarily, making casters only situationally powerful).

I think Obsidian has actually implemented the perfect solution in POE2 Deadfire. A way to keep spellcasters impactful without rendering them overpowered. The Vancian Per-Rest system had the problem of spellcasters only being useful situationally, and making every spell per-encounter would make them underpowered because their spells would have to be adjusted to compensate. But Obsidian has done neither of these things because of the addition of extremely long cast times. This way, spells can remain very powerful without being overpowered. Plus, your primary complaint about every spell being per-encounter is that you don't need to adapt to being down spells, but I actually think the long cast times completely invalidate that point because if you waste time casting a spell you don't actually need then you are essentially not adapting to the situation correctly (not to mention that this very harshly punishes poor positioning since you can be so easily interrupted). What needs to be done is that spells need to be made more powerful all across the board. In the current beta build, spells are extremely underpowered because they're still balanced at POE1 levels or below which doesn't account for the extremely long cast times. A completed spell should have extreme impact because of the time it takes to execute, but currently it does not.

I think that kind of spell is actually perfectly fine with a cooldown. Healing and crowd control effects are the one's that are a real problem with a cooldown. As long as it's long enough that the spell can't be easily spammed, a pure single target damage spell is fine. Though it does kinda make you wonder what the point of such a thing even is. Kind of a boring spell, especially since it's an instant cast. It'd be more interesting if it did something like make for easy interrupts. That sounds interesting, but I can see why they didn't do it. That seems too powerful. I liked how in the first POE you could unlock specific lower level spells as per encounter. I would like something like that again, per encounter (or even on cooldown), but separated from your cast limit.

The crew of the Defiant is going to get fat pretty quick at this rate.

You've actually discovered a completely different issue with this one. I had a replicated Wolf companion that was treated as a pet, by that I mean my extra wolf followed us around but it didn't engage in combat. It just watched like the MC's pet usually does (note that I mean specifically Pet, and not a Ranger Companion). In addition, I couldn't see my actual pet (the little dragon that gives you +5 defense against ground attacks) because the Wolf was being treated as my pet.

I don't understand this line of thinking. In the PoE universe, spells don't scale. For example, the Chill Fog spell does roughly the same damage as a War bow. Yet for some reason casters need to be "reigned in" via hard casting limits while physical weapons can attack all_day_long without restriction. How are casters OP without casting limits? Just to make sure you understand, I said that in reference to Tyranny, not Pillars of Eternity. And spellcasters were very, very powerful in that game both due to having rather short cooldowns and because the spell crafting system was capable of creating incredibly powerful magic. As far as Chill Fog is concerned, that spell inflicts a blind and it's an AOE that lasts a while. A war bow only hits a single target. The reason spellcasters are OP without limitations is because they can do things like that without limits, and that means that as long as the people standing on the front stay alive, you can keep doing that damage and applying that crowd control consistently. This is particularly overpowered with healing spells. Combine both of these things and not only are spellcasters OP but they can keep fights going for a very, very long time.

I agree with this. I think the intention was to make it so you aren't overwhelmed by abilities, but right now levelling is really slow so only getting one talent when you pick from so many feels really sucky and like I'm not making as much progress as I should. I've also had multiple situations where I've unlocked a new power level for my spells, but I hadn't picked all of the options I wanted from the power level I'm currently on. What I think they should do is give you one talent point for an active and one talent point for a passive ability every level. And maybe on multiclassed characters, you would get that for both of your classes but only once every other level to balance things out. Right now it feels like there's a ton of things I want to try or feel I need for my build, but most of it is out of reach.

I noticed much the same thing. Priests feel super powerful now, since even the early power level heal can get back about 25+ percent of someone's HP and the cast time is like 0.25 seconds. I also had retarget break for me at some points. More than once the icon to reposition the spell would disappear. Plus, I'd appreciate it if they made it so recasting the same spell re-positioned it instead of cancelling. But the content was level-scaled, was it not? These problems are as such perfectly valid, because it could mean that the level scaling is not functioning as intended.

This is not true. Each caster class had very useful per-encounter abilites that had a an impact on the outcome of battle. Even without spending one single spell a caster could contribute to a fight. And then you can get camping supplies like everywhere for basically nothing and inns an taverns everywhere. No reason at all to conserve spells. This is true. It's the primary reason to me that Pillars of Eternity is so much more tolerable to play than Baldur's Gate, where that was absolutely the case.

I totally agree. Spells take a really long time to cast in this game, you would think that the impact of each spell would be greater to compensate but currently many spells feel far less impactful than they did in POE1. Especially because CC spells in particular seem to have very low rolls and are almost never greater than the Fortitude of the enemy. Most rolls seem to be in the 40-50 range, but enemy Fortitude tended to me to be 60+ in many situations from what I observed.

Meals is what you want, they will grant multiple bonuses for one slot, but we can't craft them in the beta yet and they are rare outside of crafting from what I understood. That's a really good point. Until crafting is introduced, I think we should be careful about passing judgment on this subject too quickly.

It was more fun for you. I feel exactly the opposite and I always have ever since I played Baldur's Gate for the first time. A lot of this was because spells in that game were straight up far too powerful, and thus you could often not use your spells because you needed to save them for when you had to fight against enemy spellcasters. In POE2 I feel a lot more comfortable with using my spells every fight than I did in POE1, and in fact I think THAT encourages more creative strategies. Because removing options from your range of tools means that there are inherently fewer possibilities. I really like the spellcasting system in POE2, it strikes a really nice balance between POE1's Vancian system (which suffers from save scumming and balance issues) and Tyranny's far too simplified cooldown system (where spellcasters became hilariously overpowered because they could just keep casting). I agree with you about the strength of spells though. They feel much too weak in the current build. It feels like while balancing them they only took into consideration that Empowers were a thing and decided to nerf spells in general to compensate, but they forgot that they added a massive casting time where spellcasters that are poorly positioned can be easily interrupted. It's weird that something like the Priest's instant heal feels like it has an enormous impact on the pace of combat but a Fireball it took like 5 seconds to cast barely does anything.

It certainly doesn't feel slow... Combat is way too confusing as is. Feels more like Tyranny and less like POE. That's the point. POE in slow mode felt too slow, unrealistically so, but it was a better pace for the combat so most people used it. The only difference between Pillars of Eternity 2 in default speed and Pillars of Eternity 1 in slow mode is the way the animations are made. The animations are made to work with the slower combat speed so that everyone doesn't look like they're moving in slow motion. So unless they sped up the combat without telling anyone or that change isn't in the beta for some reason (I am 100 percent sure that in one of the Q&As or backer updates they said that the default combat speed in POE2 is the slow mode from POE1, I just don't know which one), if you were able to play POE1 in slow mode and felt that the speed was fine, then you should be able to play POE2 at it's default speed. Especially because there's far fewer things to account for in any given moment since they cut out a party member and streamlined a lot of the combat stuff. One thing I do think they need to do though is decrease Stride across the board. All of the characters feel to me as if they cross the screen too quickly, and especially in the sand pits on Poko Kohara it makes it feel like the characters are lacking in weight. The importance of positioning doesn't seem to be as emphasized as much as it was in the first game.

No, we disagreed with aspects of your assessment, and you dismissed our disagreements. I'm not saying things to defend the game, I just feel the injury system works well as it is. I'm not saying I'm right about that, I'm just sharing my perspective. You should share yours without dismissing ours. Otherwise there's no way to reach a system that's agreeable for most. You need to realize that you are only describing your experience with the system, and not everyone has the same experience. I wasn't being forced to constantly rest, and I certainly wasn't being forced to save scum to progress as long as I was being attentive and playing efficiently. So yes, I see your opinion, I just don't agree with it. That doesn't mean you're wrong, we'd need more data to figure that out.

I think that I have a much easier time telling if my attacks are going to deal damage to the target or not than I did in Pillars of Eternity 1.

But uh... yea, there is a point to disagree with, and I did. Your judgment of the system was based on an anecdote, I offered my experience to counterbalance it. I did multiple fights with active injuries and made it through them just fine on most likely a harder difficulty than you (you can correct me on that point if I'm wrong). It seems to me that you just didn't effectively play around your injuries, not that they're in some way overbearing. Especially since I played with a party that I would consider poorly spec'd all around. The auto-leveled Wizard and Rogue in particular were really suboptimal. Not a single time in the Beta did I ever die in the same fight more than once (except for one fight early on where I was still figuring out my party and playing with the stealth systems), I didn't do any save scumming, and I only rested once. The injuries felt fine to me. Your traps complaint is a completely different point. I had 16 perception on my MC and I spotted every single trap in the entire beta, so I can't attest as to whether or not certain traps are invisible but I seriously doubt that's what Obsidian intended. Which would make it a bug.

One thing I noticed was that on Chanter, one of the Invocations listed that it got rid of "Dexterity Afflictions". What the heck is a Dexterity Affliction anyways?

Don't think I agree with you here. I played on Veteran and I only rested once or twice throughout the entire course of the Beta. Managed it just fine with only a couple wipes. By the way, you can see traps with your eyes. You just need to slow down, pay attention, and avoid them. Not to mention that Mechanics is not how you detect traps, you detect them with Perception. If you want you're rogue to be able to see traps, make sure they have higher Perception. Or make a character/adventurer with a higher Perception stat.

Just so you know, I'm LOVING the game so far, but I'm guessing that negative feedback is more useful to you devs so I'm going to do my best to tear this game apart. Please don't think I hate the game. I played a Troubadour/Sharpshooter. 1: I want a bird companion. Why don't we get a bird companion? Gimme Senu from Assassin's Creed Origins damnit! Bird hopping man, I want to have a bird so I can see that sick hopping feature in action. 2: I think you should reduce the total number of possible injuries before Permadeath to two. Getting up after fights I think is actually a cool mechanic that makes for some epic last stands and I don't want to see it go, but being able to go down more than once in a fight seems really cheesy to me. Also I think some things about it could feel more natural. The enemies returning to where they were standing before fighting you feels pretty artificial and "gamey". And if your characters are going to stand up, I'd rather them do it with style like with a yell before charging back into battle. And instead of just people out of range getting back up, I'd like everybody to have a chance of getting back up (maybe depending on an attribute check?). I just like the feel of it. It makes death feel less punishing when it does happen and it can put you into some really interesting tactical situations that are really fun to play out of. 3: There's still too much loot in this game. It makes finding gear less special when most of the equipment isn't differentiated from each other. I like the idea that enemies are going to drop whatever they would realistically be carrying, but I'd honestly prefer a weight limit or something so that you have to be more selective instead of just clicking "take all" every time the loot window comes up and going through everything later. The Unrestricted Stash option turned off is kind of like this, but because everything you pick up just goes straight to your stash anyways, it doesn't really end up playing like that. If it's not too difficult and you'd like to stick with this loot system, I'd really like an option that only allows you to put loot into your individual characters inventory slots to better suit what makes the game fun to me. Of course, only if enough people feel the same way, obviously I don't want you to design the game around me or something LOL 4: Playing a Troubadour doesn't feel as impactful as I thought it would. The Brisk Recitation modal doesn't speed up my chanting enough for me to feel it. I really loved the idea of this subclass, but currently I'm not feeling like Brisk Recitation has that big of an effect. To explain, the identity of the Troubadour to me is a subclass that plays around the situation, activating Brisk Recitation to get invocations faster while forfeiting the full effect of your chants, and deactivating it if passive effects are more important or all of the important invocations are already used. But stacking up phrases with Brisk Recitation still feels slow instead of rapid, and I'd like it to be a lot faster with a greater distinction between when it's on and off. I'd actually even love some kind of penalty when you switch between the modal being on and off, to reward skilled use of the modal and keep things balanced. 5: In the same breadth, I don't think that the Sharpshooter subclass should have a modal. I think i'd prefer if there was just a straight up ability it granted that guaranteed a hit and then went on cooldown. This would make the Sharpshooter subclass feel more impactful in my opinion. 6: So overall in my opinion, I think that since you introduced Subclasses as a way for players to more thoroughly personalize their characters, a greater focus should be made into making sure that Subclasses abilities can be felt. Building around unnoticeable passive effects makes using a Subclass unsatisfying and doesn't satisfactorily contribute to providing the fantasy I had for my character. At least as far as my experience with these two Subclasses are concerned. By the way, adding additional visual effects would be a great way to make these feel more impactful without tweaking numbers too much. Like, the chanting window for a Troubadour who has Brisk recitation active could glow and leave an afterimage for each chant's icon to further imply speed, for example. I don't know how difficult that would be to do but it would really help as far as I'm concerned. 7: The level up window seriously needs a display for how many talent points you have available. It's weird not knowing whether I can unlock more abilities. 8: Having to leave an object you're interacting with in order to move out of range characters into range in order to use them for the skill check is really tedious and inconsistent. 9: When an enemy uses an ability, I would really like a way to get more information on what's about to happen so I can react accordingly. 10: Not being able to use the scroll wheel to access the text log anymore is kind of annoying. 11: The lore-tagging is not extensive enough. There were multiple times during my playthrough where I encountered lines of dialogue that read like complete gibberish, like one time Vektor starts a sentence with Pagrun. I had no idea what the heck he was talking about at the time so the entire rest of what he said was entirely lost on me. 12: Character creation should have an option to use your character model's face as the portrait, so that I don't have to do it myself in a roundabout manner by using screenshots and custom portraits. 13: Level scaling should have the option to scale levels down as well as up. 14: Characters shouldn't play a voice cue every single time you examine an object in the world. 15: There should be an option to distract characters while you're stealing their stuff. 16: I have no idea how the new concentration/interrupt mechanics work. 17: The rest bonuses in the inn all say "temp rest bonus", so I have no idea what I'm actually paying for. 18: Normal saves and Quicksaves should be listed above Autosaves in the load game window. 19: Maybe I'm just missing something, but the time it takes to cast a spell should be listed in the tooltip. 20: This is my personal opinion, but consumables should be instantaneous with a cooldown before you can use the next one rather than require an animation. In the current system, I never can figure out the right moment to use consumables that aren't health potions/traps/scrolls, and punishing me less for using them would make me more willing to experiment. 21: The mechanics tooltip still says it helps you spot traps. 22: Being able to autosave on a timer would be nice. 23: The UI thing for chanter phrases on my character portrait should be bigger and more showy, so I can tell when I gain a phrase more easily. It's almost impossible to tell at the moment and it further contributes to the feeling that I'm not gaining phrases for my invocations very quickly. 24: Considering how much junk is in this game, bringing up a window to ask me how many things I want to sell from the stack really slows things down. POSITIVE FEEDBACK TO REDEEM MYSELF 1: Music still great. Thanks Justin Bell. 2: Graphics are incredible. The fog effects, the water, the shadows, all gorgeous. 3: Story still great. 4: Combat much improved over the first one. It's much easier to understand what's going on at any given moment and spells feel impactful while also not feeling overpowered. 5: Exploring feels good, though I think it could use some more visual effects. It doesn't have enough personality to it. Travelling also really doesn't feel as dangerous as it should, but I'm sure that'll be resolved when you add random encounters. 6: I love the new resting/food system. I never used food in the first game, but now it is much easier to use through a natural process. Awesome stuff. 7: I loved the different ways you could resolve quests in the beta. My personal favorite moment was saying nothing and through doing so preventing a man's execution. 8: Character creation is awesome. I really feel like I'm creating a unique character. I also like how many different skills and playstyles there are to choose from. Lot's of fun. 9: Loved the dungeon. It really felt like I was constantly being asked to do something different, rather than doing a lot of one thing at a time. 10: The new dialogue window looks fantastic and much less intrusive than the one from POE1. 11: The class specific interactions feel incredibly special and I f**king love them. The chanter interaction with that girl with the drum is one of the most beautiful, poignant moments I've ever had in a video game. Whoever wrote this is a f**king genius and deserves a raise. More please! 12: Choose your own adventure sequences were awesome enough already, but I love the guesswork you have to do to navigate them even more! All the different ways they can play out and the subtle ways to indicate which skills you should be trying to prioritize for a check are great. 13: Those gunpowder barrels in the dungeon were expertly placed. I loved how you could intuit that because the enemies they were placed next to are immune to fire, that they weren't placed there for the fight and must be for something else. The encounter design is also just better in general and a big step up from the first game (and PARTICULARLLY WM1). I'll make another post if there's anything else I can think of. Thanks for reading :3

I bundled my output_log.txt and all of my savegames into a RAR file you can download here on Dropbox: https://www.dropbox.com/s/3rwbbdvf7cadn76/POE2Stuff.rar?dl=0 I'll try and timestamp as many issues as I can from the stream I did which you can watch here: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/201491368 You can also watch it here if that VOD gets deleted by Twitch: ISSUE 1: Chanter Invocations require focus? (Note: I played a Troubadour/Sharpshooter) TIMESTAMP: 2:19:35 ISSUE 2: Wolf Companion Replicated as pet? TIMESTAMP: 3:36:50 (it happens on and off throughout the entire rest of the stream) ISSUE 3: Quest Completed... over and over and over and over again. (Broodmother's Fury) TIMESTAMP: 3:39:50 (It doesn't stop until I restart the game) ISSUE 4: "Ghosted" Food Items Prevent me from consuming food while resting/healing injuries. TIMESTAMP: 5:13:12 ISSUE 5: Stuck in a wall. (this and the previous bug also happened during Ellohime's stream) TIMESTAMP: 5:30:16 Some general technical issues I had: - The game crashed 3 times. - The music is screwy. Combat music very often refuses to play when combat starts, music doesn't switch when moving between locations, world map is silent, etc etc - This isn't completely technical, but stealth/enemy detection can be really wonky. Sometimes I'll be able to draw enemies away, and other times when I fight them it draws in all enemies nearby. I feel this needs to be tuned to be more consistent, as the new stealth mechanics are probably my favorite gameplay addition in this entire game. As an armchair dev, I'd also like to suggest that you might want to put some kind of ring that shows you the range at which a sound can be heard by enemies, to facilitate cool sneaky tactics.

Slow mode from the first Pillars of Eternity is the default combat speed in Pillars of Eternity 2 Deadfire.

I'm going to make that Troubadour/Sharpshooter that I've been dreaming of ever since I heard about the Multiclasses.

Speaking of the stream, I'm pretty sure the game has a memory leak. The longer Ellohime played, the worse the framerate got.