Wormerine

https://jesawyer.tumblr.com/post/170559585501/how-would-you-feel-about-having-a-customizable

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Pa-qgRasdvc

Happy to see more skill points for single classes. With passive tree getting expanded they will be needed. I was worried that investing into passives with singleclass characters will be too much of a loss, making multiclass even more useful. As it is, multiclass will still have a bigger flexibility due to dual resource pools. Josh will not be one buying and playing his game, I imagine, so listening to feedback is a smart thing to do. He seems to know what he aims for, and changes Obs made are tackling some of the issues PoE1 had. Deadfire had a benefit on being a sequel to a game inspired by IE games - they can move further from the source now. I found PoE1 to be the best in story and mechanics when it was exploring its own ideas, instead of trying to recreate what was good in 90s. It’s dangerous for creator to rely on his point of view, as it gets skewed during lengthy work on a project. While he quotes fan feedback as a reason for change a bit too often for my taste but he gave good, logical reasons for said changes as well. With B.B. we still pretty much have the same build we had months ago - I do sincerely hope that what we get in April will be much better. All the changes should work on paper but in B.B. they are off in BB.

It doesn’t seem there will be additional drastic changes to ship2ship combat, however, most of the things I requested are in the game, but they are either bugged, or not communicated properly. It certainly isn’t a system which will steal a show, but that’s potentially good, depends on how frequent the encounters will be. I am not sure how I feel about critical damage being done when shot from bow/stern. I would like a better view of my stats and what my chances are for doing specific damage (hull, crew, sails, special events). With some automation (flee, board) it might be fine. @Sedrefilos yes! Shanties! Ship combat will be part of bounties, and factions - enemy factions will become hostile, probably will become friendlier with enemy factions of a sunken ship (a bit like in New Vegas). Being able to “fool” factions by wearing false flag is neat. You might want to raid a ship or two on your way to your destination to pay for the trip. We will see. I like that the ship is more than a cursor on a map.

Ah! That’s interesting. I was wondering how people find time to watch their characters wait through recovery, with all the craziness that is happening. In solo runs it makes so much more sense. It reminds me of NWN1. I got stuck in a fight with spider where we couldn’t hit each other, so I went to make some tea while my character was swinging at the enemy occasionally hitting him. They were still swinging when I came back.

Josh never encouraged importing save games from PoE1. While it is a feature, he always stated you will be able to start a new playthrough configuring everything that matters to your preferences. It has never been said that you will gain a bit of “advantage” by playing PoE1 first. There are no “golden pantaloons” for example. As far as spoiler goes - Josh said the save creator will allow you configure main choices (end state of the world, companions etc. Would be my guess) and optional advanced options with smaller choices that get reactiviry. Let’s be honest, how much reactivity can there be - if there will be 20 references to minor choices from PoE1 I will be impressed, and that would be easy to set up within minutes.

What are you on about? “Iron man” has been a thing in RPGs since I can remember (rogues&likes, wizardry8) but it isn’t a “benchmark” or a definitive way to play. It’s a singleplayer RPG - you do you, let others do their own thing. I imagine that implementing a system which tests your skills with an already implimented ruleset is easier to do, than designing and balancing an entirely new one. In Deadfire there is something like “Beraths Blessing” which on consequent playthroughs we allow players to add some bonus challenges or bonuses to vary things up. It might do it for ya.

I found it informative enough. Couple information regarding changes, and explained a lot of current ship mechanics.

Good news. It was a big complain during in-house testing as well. Yesterday during stream Josh confirmed that they will remove it and you will be able to move/change spell without loosing your resource.

If that is what you think, then, no, you are not starting to understand me.Joe I “love” how you respond without actually having anything to say. That wasn’t a guess, but an observation. I can see you have no interest in discussion. G-bye.

I think some of that thinking (all of that thinking?) was built on the original premise of roll your stats and decide what class best suits the resulting rolls. Of course, back in the day, Charisma was always fodder for some animated discussions on what it was exactly, too, never mind how important it should be. I'll give BG credit for having it affect shop pricing. I never thought of that as a DM. Makes sense. What I liked about stats in at least PnP D&D vs PoE is that having a certain stat score did not always guaruntee outcomes. It increased chances for things, but sometimes, depending on how DMs weighted certain encounters an intelligence or other attribute score could be high enough with at least had a _chance_. Now with PoE your stat is either high enough or it isn't. You don't even get a probability roll. To me that removes role playing entirely from many encounters. You are comparing tabletop experience to singleplayer computer game RPG - here I think I start to understand your stance a bit, but at the same time I havr to point out issues with that line of thinking. PoE isn't tabletop game, isn't played with DM (not present, human one) and is a singleplayer experience. Making a roll for a conversation/skill check would only make sense, if the game had a hard ironman mode. It is a bad design, to include mechanics which can be easily avoided. For example, "Transistor" had a neat variation on the death system, however, it could be easily bypassed by reloading last checkpoint making system irrelevant. It's the same reason why chance of being ambushed during resting was removed - because players who got ambushed in a critical situation would reload, therefore the mechanics didn't do its job in this particular type of game. Dice rolls during attribute distribution in BGs was bad, because you could roll it as much as you please. And of your roll badly, DM won't adjust game for you to have fun. I understand, it had its role in a tabletop, but those two are, and shouldn't be, the same. In lengthy cRPG its more important that you can create a character you want, rather to have to adjust to inferior and randomized attributes.

If they were to show newer build it should be worth it. If we are again, back to basic, I might not bother with staying till 2AM again. We shall see.

https://twitter.com/WorldofEternity/status/963856238323818496 Stream tonight! This time with some random streamer. Everyone prepare your questions of an interogation, just in case, though I feel it might be more of an advertisement stream, than anything worthwhile for us, backers.

It's Valentines Day so I am rewatching relationship update.

I finally watched Duncan Jones’ Warcraft. As someone, who believed that decision to adapt Blizzard’s IP to be a horrible idea from the very beginning, it wasn’t half bad. Yeah, it was boring, visually confused movie with too many plots and too little character but from my experience it’s Warcraft in a nutshell - a lot of lore, not much story. Gameplay which makes blizzard games worth playing can’t be translated into a movie.

We really really don’t know. I would prefer if save creator would include all of the choices, so I can easily replay Deadfire without feeling I am missing out without going through PoE1. Josh said they want it to be a seperate program (so not in game editor) and that they plan to have main choices, and extra detailed one as an option. However, it was at the stage when editor hasn’t been made yet. It was never definitely specified how detailed (or undetailed) the editor will be.

Did you move supplies into ship’s consumption que (ship management, the most upper right inventory box). Crew won’t eat supplies from your general stash. I have reported an issue I encountered with splitting stacks of item in ship management view - not sure if it’s the same problem you have. Or something completely different: https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/96080-problem-with-splitting-stacks-of-items-in-ship-management-view/

All I am going to say is I pretty much disagree with everything you've said there. I don't see how it is less roleplaying with a slightly dimwitted gorilla who loves his hamster. Seems the heart of roleplaying to me. Joe Hmm... I am not really sure what you disagree with. It is not “less” of a roleplaying if you create Minsc like character, but other builds aren’t much on an option in D&D 2nd ed. Archers with medium/low dexterity, melee fighters with medium/low strength or wizards with medium/low intelligence are just wrong character choices. Game asks you to choose your sex (your preference), race (your preference) and class (your preference) and than asks you to distribute attributes but this time it’s a multiple choice with good and wrong answers - you either invest in few attr your class benefits from, or will have a bad time. Pillars tries to make this part of character creation also more of a choice. Especially important as in PoE your attributes had impact on conversations. You can distribute attributes as you would with Minsc in BG and you will still get more or less a similar character archetype.

To me that is a big minus. It shouldn't take an applied mathematics masters degree to figure out to make a fighter who is strong enough wielding the weapon of their choice to do massive damage and take damage, AKA either Minsc or Dorn. Or how to make a wizard on par with either Edwin or Dynaheir. This is a simplicity that doesn't even exist in PoE I. Not that you can't build them, but it is a simpler design in BG/D&D. Well, but building a melee combat specialist who hits hard, and can take a lot of hits is still easy - favour strength, resolve and constitution. Same with casters - resolve will give you the biggest boom. But they will suffer in other areas. Why have attribute system at all, if your class defines what attributes you have to take? At this point you might tie attributes to classes and not allow players to distribute them at all. A big boon of PoE system is that, like me, you can create character by your roleplaying desires and have him work fine, even on a hard difficulty. I will leave min-maxing to rocket engineers.

Wait, this thread is still going on?!

I think the challenge of optimizing a build in POE is partly a byproduct of something POE does well -- the attributes are (generally) useful for any character and so huge variety of builds are "good" in the sense of being viable. I also think you may be overrating how straightforward optimizing was in the IE games. If you're a first-time player with no detailed knowledge of the game mechanics, how do you know what amount of DEX is "good enough" for a fighter? How do you know how far you can drop your mage's CON? (never mind advanced questions like "when should you dual class?"). I'm not sure a smaller number of useful stats for a given class actually answers much of the optimization question, and it brings real risks that a player will unknowingly create a build that is not just suboptimal but unworkable. Yeah, I think this is what PoE does well. What it doesn't do well is explain what description: "extra point of Dexterity adds +3% extra attack speed" means, and how does it interact with different weapons and fighting styles. The thread about action speed is still beyond my understanding calculating animations, recoveries, it's all a very tangled mess. I think PoE is fine on a basic level (having 60% hover over an enemy is way more readable to me than behind the scenes literal dice rolls) but when you try to understand its subtleties, it becomes very unaccessible. I still don't get how people achieve those insane DPS builds and how they find wizards to be underperforming. But then again, I thought I understand PoE system, and than dived into some of the thread here and I accepted that I know nothing.

I think the expaction is that you will view gods in PoE as D&D style, or Olympian style. Reveal at the end is less about what they are, or questioning their power, but asking: should they exist and should they have this power and do they deserve to have such profound influence over people. To me it was less about Gods, and more about humanity. Do people deserve to know there is no higher power? Is higher power really reliable if it was created by humans? I am still trying to figure out what my orlan merchant would think... hopefully deadfire will help in making my mind up.

April needs to come now. We are becoming paranoid. As far as current system improvements I want clearer feedback. If something doesn’t work, I want to know why. If I am about to empower an ability I would like to know what it will do. If I add points to migh/resolve/dexterity, I would like to be able to figure out how it will influence my performance. Cant make conscious and satisfying decisions if the system is so obtuse. Still as Sedrefilos said: I will probably enjoy my first play through regardless. I usually start understanding systems somewhere in the last 3rd of a playthrough. At this point, I am finally tackling deadly enemies and can’t powerthrough them. At this point you discover these nuances like items buffing constitution on your tank not stacking...