snphillips0@gmail.com

In the beta my SC ascendant, with draining whip and two weapon style using wands (just for fun, idk what's actually the best weapon for this), consistently hit max focus extremely quickly. The amount of time you spend ascended is also super generous, it feels a lot longer than it looks on paper. So, I'd definitely say they're viable! Certainly I'll be playing one in my first playthrough.

I'd *imagine* it's because resistance is a discrete trait, rather than a modifier; "downgrade the appropriate affliction" instead of "+1 affliction level downgraded". Makes sense as a balance thing, but like everything else it'd be cool if it were made more explicit.

It's been "planned" for a while but yeah, not actually implemented. Happy to hear it got finished.

The better metaphor is people reading Lord of the Rings before the Hobbit, which people do all the time. Same with any of the countless mystery and urban fantasy series out, or with movie series like the Fast and the Furious, Halloween, Mad Max, etc.

I fully agree with all of these criticisms, and think they all actually amount to the largest and most important problems the game has, above and beyond remaining balance problems and most non-game-breaking bugs. This is one of the very first things a player sees on starting, after all. Its a less urgent thing, but I'd also like to add, I hate that choosing gender locks appearance options. Especially when it doesn't lock portrait options. Why can I have a beard in my portrait but not my model? It's an unnecessary and frankly silly restriction. That said, it's obviously a secondary concern to most everything in the OP since unlike all that it doesn't make the process actively more difficult to go through.

I definitely cast echo on a chanter's skeleton just earlier today, so that seems to be the case.

I wonder if it's intentionally unbalanced, as a beta-specific thing for the people on here who've been making crazy optimized builds to test those builds' limits. I've seen somewhere Josh saying that was one of the reasons they chose this area, with the titan, in the first place, but that it wasn't doing its job for various reasons. If so I think that'd be cool, but unless they explicitly say it we obviously can't assume it to be the case. And it certainly is too much for the default squad right now.

Yeah, I'm out. "The natives had slavery too" is a centuries old, deeply racist argument that has never held up under even cursory examination. If your argument for why moral equivalence in the game being justified is that you think it's true in real life, then we have nothing more to talk about. Likewise, to Veevoir, refusing to acknowledge the most obvious, surface-level observation that a fantasy version of colonialism is necessarily a direct parallel to real world colonialism means we can't have a meaningful conversation. I've made my position clear, I've heard y'all out, we all know where each other stands. The devs have my feedback, and I hope realize how strongly people feel about this stuff. I'm out. Say whatever else you want, I'll definitely read it. But unless my arguments are genuinely and in good faith engaged with, I'm staying done.

What you are describing is accurate to the quest, and it is deeply messed up. Colonialism is not some far-distant problem of the past, fair game for making light of; it's a centuries-long, worldwide system of oppression and mass scale violence that has caused the robbery, torture, genocide, enslavement, disenfranchisement, and destruction of culture of millions upon millions of people. It not only has repercussions lasting to today, it is *currently ongoing*. Insisting that the Huana, who explicitly and unavoidably parallel these real-world victims, are morally equivalent to their colonizers *necessarily* implies the same is true in the real world. This is, indisputably, unacceptable. Therefore, any example of it that crops up deserves to be called out and condemned. This in literally no way means simplifying the narrative! It in fact means the exact opposite: moral equivalence on this subject is by far the easier, and more common, way of handling it. The choice is not between noble savages and evil cannibals; both are ****ty, hyper-simplified, cliched tropes. The goal is to have *nuance*, to depict a culture that is intrinsically valuable even with its warts, that can be worthy of critique without its oppression ever being condoned. To demand instead that they be depicted as the same as their colonizers, rather than unique from them, is to advocate for the narrative to be simplified, not complicated. Edited to add: I want to be clear that I don't expect this game to be full of gross equivalencies like I'm describing. I think this quest is a pretty glaring misstep, and the game could only be improved by its removal, but it's ultimately just one smallish piece of side content in a massive, many-authored game. Certainly the devs are playing with fire by setting the game where they did, as this quest proves, but that doesn't mean it can't turn out excellent, or even that if it screws up in places that that'll necessarily ruin the whole; I'm a huge fan of messy art, and I think it's worth seeing some stumbles along the way to tackling a difficult subject when the potential outcome is so promising. Obsidian is full of talented people, and they are aware of what they've taken on. But the pitfalls are there, and very real, and no amount of good faith on a creator's part will make falling into them not worth loudly calling out and criticizing. This stuff is just too important.

The problem isn't that we shouldn't think what is happening to the animals is better than what's happening to the natives, it's that the animals and their treatment was created in the first place. The devs *chose* to make quest equating the oppression of a native population -- something with real-world (and still-ongoing) parallels -- to something both fantastical and infinitely smaller in scale. It is very explicitly both-sidesing *colonialism* of all things, and that deserves to be called out. Especially when colonialism is as central to a game's conceit as it is in Deadfire.

"However, thing I like about the new system, is that it makes it easy to recognize when you do a wrong thing. I wonder how much unsatisfaction with the new system comes from a better feedback than an actual mechanic - in PoE1 you could attack enemy with ineffective weapon and simply never realize that unless you pay a very close attention. To be honest I rarely changed my weapons in PoE1. With Deadfire system its really easy to judge when your weapon is effective and when it is not. I tend to change targets, switch weapons, consider my spells much more in Deadfire than I did in PoE1. If I make a bad decision, it is quite easy to recognize." This is the key to whole thing -- it's not about simplicity v complexity, or ultimately about balance at all, it's about *feedback*. The behavior you're describing is exactly why Obsidian wants to see. It wasn't happening with DR, it is happening with Pen/AR: the mechanic is successful. It just isn't finished being balanced (in the beta, anyway) yet. Personally, I'd really just like the numbers to be much smaller, so there we be fewer or, even no, deadzones where nothing changes when you add or subtract small amounts of Pen or AR. I recognize though that that would make abilities and effects that modify them *much* stronger, and therefore necessitate then being much rather -- and changing that much stuff would obviously be a huge undertaking.

Same as some folks above, got and entered my key but the game does not show up in my library. Any word on if and how this can be fixed?

Might be pulling this out of my ass, but I could swear I remember Josh Sawyer saying in one or more Q&A streams that they thought Deadfire should run on just as many of not more systems than POE1, thanks to much better optimization. Which makes sense to me, since POE didn't exactly run very well, even on some great PCs.

Restricting armor and weapons by stats would explicitly betray what was probably the single biggest guiding goal for Pillars' design -- an elimination of traps and unviable builds. If you don't already know ahead of time what equipment you will want to use throughout the entire game, you can get hours in and suddenly hit a roadblock when you learn something you want or need is unusable. Sure, they could give you a list of every moment req during creation, but that is a massive amount of information to ask a new player to process, in the middle of a system that is already full of new info. This is the fundamental hurdle any attribute system will have to overcome, if it is to be at all applicable to Pillars. It must be actively difficult take unviable builds, regardless of character concept. So, every stat must be useful to every class and nothing can be restricted based on stats. Different systems can be great on their own terms, and I'm sure there are useful things in then that can be applied here, but these core values can't be sacrificed; this is Pillars'system's fundamental identity. Which is all to say, I think the best solutions to the original issue was said a few times pretty early on -- put a check in the relevant scenarios that, if you're playing a magically strong character, replaces the text with something more appropriate; justify it all in fiction better, making physical strength a prerequisite for strong magic; or, my favorite and something I'm expecting in Deadfire, replace all stat checks with skill checks.

Sí, será hecho en Espanol