Wormerine

Wizards are monsters. I am trying to force myself to take Aloth out of my party for once. I have three Grimoires which i constantly switch between so his spell range is pretty good. I am not convinced to Druids but I barely used Takehu. Need to level him up and give him a fair shake.

Now when I am thinking on it, Xoti seemed to get stuck at 2.5 reputation with me. I also got an achievement for reaching maximum approval of a companion (Xoti being the highest).

I would say it’s solid, but wait if you don’t mind. Bug wise, the only issue I saw were save imports which are supposed to be patched tomorrow. I hear PotD has issues now, and apparently content scaling doesn’t work. I find Veteran alright, but it could have been a bit tougher. Difficulty is more consistent right now I would say. It doesn’t seem to raise difficulty so far, which is an issue as a PoE1 player should have maybe a bit too easy of a time.

Yes to all of that. As the game progresses you get to talk to companions a bit more, but I did feel as well like we are skipping some important beats. I understand the desire to trip writing as it was the biggest complaint about PoE for many people but I am supposed to romance companions, and I just know nothing about them, beyond what is in their “reputation” sheet. Sadly, with full VO there might not be a way to fix any of that.

Nope. It’s a long time request feature, something dev acknowledged it would be good to implement, but never found time to do so. The last time we heard about it was “maybe after launch”. Keep asking for it:-)

It would be nice overall, to be able to access skill trees outside leveling up and character creation.

Yeah someone reported it already.

I just rested for the 2nd time in about 25 hours of gameplay:-). I think you idea could be interesting, but: you have to always have PC in your party. That’s the biggest issue I have, as rotating companion composition to let them heal could be an interesting mechanic. That’s sort of the problem, which previous system couldn’t get over either - you can’t really do a serious damage to PC and companions are they are crucial to enjoyment of the game. Imagine how this system could mess with players questing - even if they didn’t need to be inactive in order to heal, it probably would be undiserabke to stack up woulds on one companion. I plan to go to the Gullet next, and let’s say that Takehu or Serafim are injured, and I want to take them with me, because of story and faction reasons. Having to wait for them to heal could have been annoying. Any long term resource management is in clash with how the game’s bigger structure is designed. I don’t feel like ditching resting (which I feel Deadfire did to some extend) is hurting the game that much.

I mean, all Josh confirmed here is that the rebalance won’t come with the hotfix.

I think it would be cool, if such quests would support the change - maybe convince a companion that their faction isn’t ideal etc. At the same time those changes seem to go beyond what character development I saw so far. I finished Xoti and Serafim’s “vision quests” but they didnt really change them as characters. Xoti got upgated lantern out of it - and Serafim got a new gun.

As expected I don’t find myself using it too much. I liked it for the first 10 minutes of game but it’s just not worth the long wait to get to bartender. I tend to try to toggle it in closed spaces as it looks better than running around, but it usually goes together with fast-forward. Which actually pretty well imitates awkward movement of IE games.

Yeah, they are not bad, just provide different kind of thrills than BGs or Planescape. I played IWD2 fairly recently for the first time, and I was pleasantly surprised. I was shocked how different stats and classes influenced dialogues - something older IE games didn’t do.

Ship combat seem to be either: Rush to board and kill them or sink them. I was dissapointed when I found out that you could not just soften them up before boarding them. I remember reading to my surprise recently that it is not intended behaviour and they will look into it. However, it worked the same in the beta.

It should be like that, yes. If class shares some passives, when picked on one tree, it should show as unlocked on both, however, it is still a single passive.

Yeah, crew healing work fine, but they need to be in the reserve (lower right slots on ship management skills). Crew will heal immediately when docking in port, as long as you have medicine for it - same with ship’s repairs.

I don’t know how much time would it take to make it happen, but decided to though it out already. I find leveling up multiple levels to be a real chore. Lots of clicking and going through page after page, picking one or two skills before moving on and doing it over and over. I still have characters in my party who are at lvl 1, as getting them to level 10 just seems like too much hassle. Would it be feasible to be able to level up all they way up in one go? UI wise it shouldn’t be an issue. On ability screen instead of 1 skill points per active and social abilities you get ten. A bigger challenge might be the abilitiy screen (especially multiclassing), as you unlock new power levels after spending certain amount of skills. Still, being able to spend all available ability points in one go would make the entire process much smoother.

I have noticed it as well. Characters seem to mention and talk about stuff as if you talked about it already. I remember Xoti being especially weird early on. I did tell Xoti I was a Watcher, don’t know how the other conversation path goes. I had “wait what are we talking about exactly” moments couple times.

All single class for me:-D. I will experiment with multiclassing on my second playthrough, once I know skill trees better. Actually, I made Ydwin a multiclass, but you know... she is a sidekick and leveling up multiple levels is a chore, so she is still lvl 1.

Oh is it really? Higher stats don’t work or something? I thought they simply didn’t do much work on it.

If you played IWDs for gripping story and characters, then sure it was disappointing. But OP mentions what he enjoyed in IWD games, and those are not a focus of PoEs. Why would he looks for IWD fulfillment in PoE1&2 is beyond me.

Doesn't that incourage you to swap companions around? Frankly the XP gap isn't that big to be impactful. I also tend to switch companions depending on quest I am doing (I won't be taking Pallegina when I am working with Principi for example).

Yes, I believe that’s the case.

Played PoE on both veteran and PotD. Playing Deadfire on veteran with critical path upscaled. So far I find the game more consistent in challenge. Nothing as challenging as beginning of PotD, but also nothing as boring as PotD outside opening areas and dragons/archwizards. I don’t use any of the broken builds, and didn’t multiclass anyone, so I am far from minmaxing. Knowing how beta plays I can imagine how my monk/cipher would absolutely maw through everything. I got couple tough fights, but I feel like I wondered to a high level bounty.

Or they just decided to let players go wild ;-)

I think it’s leftover from beta. Overall, if ability gets improved it should replace its own version. If it costs more, then both are available. For example mule kick used to cost two discipline and knock back 1. Knockback also used to be “full attack”. They rebalanced it but didnt change it into a straight up upgrade.