Gregorovitch

Qoted wrong post - don't know how to delete. Please ignore.

I can't yet 'cos I haven't finished but I will when I have. Mixed results. Yeah. There is something funny going on here, maybe about public reaction to this game in general. I mean people can argue the Eothas story is too short or the dungeons are too small or the combat is too easy etc etc etc and all of that is subjective opinion (which people are perfectly entitled to express their opinion about of course) but this question is a matter of fact, not opinion, so how is it possible to get such a spread of contradictory answers to this question? At least 65% of respondents (at time of writing) are simply wrong on an objective fact about the game. And given the the answer that leads to that minimum "wrongness" is the one Josh Sawyer himself announced, so I suspect that answer has an unfair built in advantage. The thing is, if people can be so hopelessly mixed up about a simple question of fact about the game, to what extent are people also getting mixed up about more or less everything else about the game, including some of the big ticket complaints? And what is it that is causing this, what's at the bottom of it?

Shadow under Nekata: hope this isn't considerred spoiler but it doesn't worlk on the basis of the highest metaphysiscs score of anyone in your party, it works on your PC score plus the party assist bonus (which is some kind of weighted average). Annoyingly the game does not tell you what that party assist is unless you actually pass the test but you are probably very close to requirement and can probably resolve things with aid a of specific purchase (which you can look up I guess if you want). The sword one you just have to talk to the right NPC in Radiant Court, Dunnage..

I haven't finished the game yet (still levle 14) but so I know enough to that I agree wih every word of you post. I think you are exactly correct and that many people are either missing the point (or deliberately missing the point).

OK......,so, er, which is it?

I got trapped in the Old City at level 6 and fought my way out to the Undercroft. On arrival there I was immediately attacked and had to kill a number of pirates on the way out inclusing the group guarding the Undercroft list in Delver's Row (who also attacked me on sight). SInce then I have gained a postive rep with both the Principe and the Delver's Row criminals however the pirates in the Undercroft still attack me on sight. I have just completed the criminal boss, Darea's(?), quest and he has told me where to find Mad Marina now, and I need to speak to her about a couple of quests. However I cannot get o her becasue of the hordes of hostile pirates. I experimented by dashing through htem all to find Marina but it turns out she is hostile too. I urgently need some way to stop the Undercroft pirates from attacking me on sight.

I have just done Dereo's quest successfully. He told me where to find Mad Marina. All the pirates are still hostile.

I got trapped in the Old City having gone down the lift and found my way out via the Undercroft. I was attacked on sight on arrival. SInce then the Pitates in the udnercroft have been persistently hostile. Now I neeed to spek to Mad Marina but I can get to her withoput encountering hostile pirates and I have experimented by dashing to her location to find that Mad Marina herself is also hostile if I am seen by anybody in the Undercroft. I now have a positive rep with the Principe. But I can find no way to change to "shoot on sight" status of all the pirates in the Undercroft. This is a serious problem for me - is there any solution to this?

I don’t know how legitimate a tech site they are, but a good journalistic practice would be to seek comment from the other parties involved. TechRaptor Journalistic Practices Seek TruthTechRaptor strives to seek the truth on all matters and report honestly and fairly. Special care is given to verify all information and utilize original sources whenever possible. TechRaptor aims to never distort the facts or misrepresent them in any way either by intention or omission of facts such as context, and in cases that such may occur, steps will be taken to remedy it as soon as possible. This will be disclosed to the readers so they may know what has occurred. We shall seek out the subjects of news and ask them to respond to any criticisms or allegations. In the event that they do not respond, this will be reported in the relevant article. Should TechRaptor receive a response after the fact, it shall be updated to include said response. We shall seek viewpoints from all sides, even those we disagree with, and allow them to share their point of view. All opinions, commentary, and advocacy on matters will be labelled as such. TL;DR – Gather accurate information and report it – Use original sources – Do not distort information in any way – Remedy errors and disclose the fact if they occur – Reach out to those who are criticized or have allegations levied against them – Give a voice to all Clearly they have failed to follow their own guidelines. If they had reached out to Obsidian, and if Obdisian had refused to comment, they would have said so. That would be standard journalism practice.

Just seen the doc, feeling a bit rough. Sent me for some tests for Bubonic Plague. But it might be Leprocy. Back as soon as I can.

I am hearing that from beta players that single class wizzard is way to go, yes? Is the same true of Druid?

This isn't Dark Souls, I shouldn't be guessing about the intent of the Merchant from the Old Rebpublic who is trying to convince me to help them sink a Principi vessel. Some vague and open ended dialog is fine, basing your entire game around it? I hope your game isn't very dialog or story heavy, otherwise it will make little to no sense. Case in point, no one made rave reviews of Hotline Miami because of the story. It was the gameplay and the soundtrack that sold it. You can't maintain a tight solid narrative, and have large amounts of open ended dialog with unclear meaning at the same time. Deadfire is a story driven RPG, it needs a tight solid narrative. I think you are taking my above remark to extremes - I never said that all lines should be vague or open to multiple interpretations, I said that *some* interactions could benefit from this approach and that full voice-over could potentially work against it due to setting an explicit delivery or tone. In all honesty you probably wouldn't run across the risk of misinterpretation in most encounters anyhow provided the game is competently written (which, in Obsidian's case, they usually are). Likewise I don't think tonal or implicit ambiguity necessarily works against the tightness of narrative, that would be more if the literal or explicit meaning in plot points and certain key situations are made unclear which is not the kind of "open interpretation" I was referring to. I think an additional issue is that in a long RPG like Pillars one the the biggest degraders of the payer's experience can be when they miss an important or pivotal statement in the text that would, had they read it properly, significantly enhanced their appreciation of the story down the track. I know I have been guilty of this on occasion becasue I'm tired or I just want to go fight something already etc. It is much harder to miss this sort of thing if it's spoken. I don't disgree with you that studied ambiguity can be a good and enriching thing in narrative, but I'm not sure it trumps that.

I think those numbers are just the amounts the kickstarters raised. I'm told Sven at Larian remortgaged his house, sold his kids into slavery and his soul to the devil to get DOS1 out of the door. I'm pretty sure he put pretty much all the proceeds of DOS1 into DOS2. He might have bought back his kids, but that's about it. But he might have had to add them to the devil's soul account as well though. I think he increased the studio headcount from about 30/40 for DOS1 to over 100 for DOS2. Warm bodies are costed at around $10k per month a piece in the games industry, so given DOS2 took at least two years to make the back of my envelope has an eye watering number written on it. I dare say he might have managed to squeeze some change out of $20m, but not that much.

Probassbly why I liked it so much

Druid/Monk (aka Ascetic) would appear to hit not so much like truck but more like Armoured Fighting Vehicle. Particualr highlight is the roundhouse head kick as a bear for example. Ouch!

This is a legitimate concern IMHO. Where I draw the line on VO is when content has to be cut, or dialogs simplified, to accomodate it. However there are two points to consider: 1. Nobody could accuse Larian of cutting or simplifying content for DOS2, they just sucked up the cost of it. And it was I think almost certainly as resounding success in terms of sales which is all to the good in my book. I think it paid for itself twice over at least. There aren't 1.5m+ IE game nuts still around to account for it. These are new players and they are used to full VO and notice it bad when it's missing. 2. In the case of Deadfire since the decision to record the entire game was made long after the text was written, edited and tested, we can be sure we are getting the full monte, no cuts, no compromises. I think Obsidian have looked at how the full VO in DOS2 was recieved, shook the piggy bank, and decided to have a punt on it themselves. I would wager it will pay for itself many times over similar to DOS2. And if it does it's already paid for full VO on the next installment. If it increases the audience I'm all for it, end of. Another point, seeing as I come from "full VO over my dead body" camp until very recently, is that DOS2 has definitely changed my viewpoint. The fact is that characters like Lohse and particularly Red Prince really came to life in that game for me. VO works bascically. The only remaining concern I have is over the possibility of watering down content in the future as a result of VO costs. Any sniff of that and my torch and pitchfork are out of the shed licketysplit.

You listed a lot of videos here showing that a multiclass rogue is good, well nobody here disagree that rogue is good when multiclassed. But I think the question we discussed in this thread mainly is if single class rogue sucks or not. Also if you nerf rogue and paladin because of holy slayer combo is OP, well good luck with single class rogue, paladin players. Imo the best solution is not nerf but making class power scales more smoothly. For example making sneak attack less powerful at beginning and make it scales with Power Level. Well I'm just interested in rogues in general, and indeed the whole question of multi- vs single classing, so. If the multi-classing apect of rogues don't interest you, please feel free to ignore.

This is a demo illustrating the tender mercies of the Holy Slayer (rogue+paladin). This build is a Josh Sawyer special appareantly. Ouch!

Blimey, I don't know if you can make a Swashbuckler a Black Jacket as well, but if you could............ Looks like "Have machine gun, will travel".

Speaking of rogues, this vid demonstrates the power of the Swashbuckler: Guy tried this with two or three other classes but hadn a lot more trouble. Intereting little group of vidsl. Eder can be a Swashbuckler. Seems like pretty legit way to go to me.

No, I'm all in from the get go, day 1. Reasons are: 1. I want to enjoy the story as blind as possible, and my interest in the game is such I would not be able to resist looking at reactions to the game which inevitably contain spoilers. 2. I am fairly bug tollerant. So long as there's a workaround, that's cool with me. 3. I trust Obsidian that any real gamebreakers that emerge will be hotfixed within hours. I can wait for that. 4. Balance issues there may well be, but I probabl;y won't find them first time through and anyway I'm mostly gonna be focussing on the story, the charcters, the new systems, the new environmanets. Balance can wait for subsequent playthoughs. In short wild horses couldn't keep me away come May 8th or whatever.

How are you able to make that comparison when you are evaluating them by different metrics? What are the scales here? The scale is effective contribution to the party's success. In PoE for example Durance was far more effective than any rogue. I haven't done a mathematical analysis to demonstrate that, I just know it from experience, but I have no doubt it could be proved. I would not be surprised if the additional damage output across the party from from just Dire Blessing casts alone amounted to more than a single rogue's damage output for the whole game.

> I’m a back beta tester what does that mean? I mean we play the backer beta and we all help test the game right? but I just mean I have access to backer beta and I don’t agree the comment he made about multclass a. It would be nice if you disagreed by actually facing the opposing arguments with some numbers, facts etc. The guy you disagreed with was just summarizing video by Nerd Commando which was quite in-depth review of the current state of the beta. So what are you precisely disagreeing with? or rather what argument would you bring to the table to face some facts that were shown in the video. I watched that thing in full and he actually show in game, as a fact, the things you disagree with... I would be delighted if you were right, Yosharian, and I also know from long experiencce that Nerd Commando has his own partuclalr slant on all things RPG, but nevertheless, what he deomostrated was concerning and I too would like to hear more detail. As I explained my issue is I plan to play PotD and I need to know how far I should dip into this multi-class thing. I'm not an uber power player by any means, I am roleplayer that has come to enjoy playing on max difficulty in these games and am therefore mixing a bit of judicious min-maxing to expedite that. I don't want to find out mid-game that one or more of my builds sucks big time and have to restart. To put this another way, woth PoE's very traditional and single class approach I knew where I was from long experience with cRPGs. With this I feel completely at sea and riven by indecision, fear, uncertainlty and doubt. I'm getting conflicting messages and have no means to evaluate them since this is such a new system.

NerdCommando's video is a little old now. The game has changed. Let's wait until the game comes out, or the next beta if there is one, before we start slinging around words like balance. NerdCommando's video was released yesterday. I am also concerned about this. The charge is multi-classes have been nerfed so badly they are no longer viable (well more accurately they no longer compette with single cvlasses) because all the good abilities have been moved to higher tiers leaving only dross available in lower tiers early game. Single class characters get to pick from higher tiers much faster so they are now much more powerfull. A second charge is there is no build variety for many single-class characters. There is only one way to build a fighter for example. Leave CON and RES at 10, put INT to 3 and add the rest evenly to STR, DEX and PER since they all conttribute to multiplying up DPS. Then just take Diciplined Strike and the one or two decent passives available at lower levels (can't remember which). This outperforms any multi-class variant of a fighter by a a wide margin it seems. A third charge is that generally the skills and abilities are now mostly extremely weak and underwhelming. Those few that are any good become automatic picks thus squeezing variety out of the game. A lot of this is down to the scarcity of zeal points and the underwhelming bang per zeal point from most abilities. Essentialy this means it's best to buy those few long term buff abilities that are actually any good, particularly tyhose that cost one zeal point (such as aforementioned Diciplined Strike for example) and since there are so few of them they just become auto-picks. Anyway my concern is that I was all set to go largely multi-class (except for offensive casters which were prior to this patch stronger as pure single class) and pretty much had my party figured out. Now all that has gone out of the window and we are back to single classes. But where will we be on release? I guess it means we can't start playing until some people have worked it out and posted the verdict. I mean these sort of balance tweaks are no problem really if you only have single classes, you can adjust as the game progresses and you learn more, but the problem here is you have to be right about which is best from the get go, you can't change later without restarting the whole game (which I don't like doing). At least NerdCommando has determined the best weapon by far in the game is the Hunting Bow (lots of damage, more importantly very fast shot rate). Swords etc have been nerfed to oblivion. Spears are the way to go, or dual wield daggers/hatchets it seems.

I made the huge mistake of playing PoE on hard first playthrough. It was too easy. I should have known better. Ever since I have always played every game on hardest difficulty. I have two main reasons for playing PotD (or equivelents in other games): * it gives me a much greater sense of immersion. Decisions matter. Danger is everywhere. Makes me think, makes me sweat. * I enjoy hitting a hard boss fight that hands me my arse and having to figure ouit some tactics to beat it. Lot of satisfaction in that for me. Since I adopted this policy I have also noticed I spend a lot more time closely examining the rulesets and systems in games and as a result have discovered a lot more of what games have to offer and therefore enjoyed them a lot more. I has a real ding-dong with the early game in DOS2 for example, it was totally epic. Unfortunately I have also become one of these insufferable snobs constantly posting that such-and-such a game only truly shines on max difficulty. I guess I try to justify this to myself on the grounds that it is very defintely my experience and that, although defintely not everybody has any real interest in putting as much effort into understanding the mechanics of these games as I do (and there's no earthly reason why they should) I suspect a lot more people than one might expect would get a huge kick out of biting the bullet and going for glory becasue it really does jack up the experience a notch or three.