MortyTheGobbo

That's a pretty welcome change to the Chanter, I must say. I hope fewer phrases are as situational as some were in Pillars - like the one that gave you bonuses to Disengagement defence.

They're aggravating and persistent, thus reducing my enjoyment of the game. Isn't that reason enough to want them gone?

I've long ceased to treat "dumbed down" as a serious argument. It doesn't apply to Tyranny, it doesn't apply to Dragon Age 2 (whose combat is strictly superior to that of Origins), and it doesn't apply to Deadfire's health mechanic. I would also rather they'd stuck with health and endurance. But doing otherwise isn't "dumbing down". It's picking different priorities.

Traps have to be there, because they are cool. In what possible way are they cool? There are only two outcomes a trap can have. Either you have a high enough skill to disarm them, or one of your characters takes an injury. Or you very carefully edge your way around it, which does absolutely nothing except slow down the game. Why are they so terrible? Is it a bad thing that it slows the game down? I mean we shouldn't be able to sprint through dungeons without a care. If anything I would go the opposite way with them making them have a bigger role maybe even a subclass that can get trap bonuses and unique talents that boost their capabilities or augment them. I don't think he has a problem with traps. I think he has a problem with the fact that they are only included because people expect them to be there. Also the fact that their implementation is crap, it always has been in these games. Traps should not be like this Step 1: Sneak around until I find trap Step 2: Try to disarm trap Step 3: Was trap disarmed? If so, continue on, process complete If not, send tank to trigger trap, go to next step Step 4: Rest or use healing items/spells to recover from trap Process Complete If you are going to use traps it needs to be better than that ^^^^^. Make the traps be like from that first area in Eternity, the cave/ruins of Cilant Lis. That was how you should do a trap. If you can't do it that way every time, just don't bother including them as they aren't fun or interesting for the player. Maybe you can have the generic boring ones, but if you do, keep them only to limited moments when it makes absolute sense for their to be a trap. Not just this is a dungeon so it needs some random ass traps. Seriously, who would trap up a hallway that leads to say the only way to go upstairs? Or trap up every path leading to a room they are living in? No one in the real world, crap tons of people in Baldur's Gate like RPG land. Yeah, what Karkarov said. Traps as they are don't really add anything to the game.They're just random patches of the floor that hurt you when you step on them. We can't sprint through dungeons without a care anyway, since we can run into ambushes or miss valuable secrets. Traps are just a layer of annoyance you suffer if you run into them. If you miss a trap you sigh, reload and disarm it. Unless you can't. Then you slowly edge around it and continue on your way. Also, yes, they make no in-universe sense whatsoever, most of the time. If you're assaulting a well-fortified position, sure. But most of the time, it does go along the lines of "we need to scatter some more traps here". If it would be my game, traps would have a far less predictable and far more terrible outcome. I'm a big fan of oldschool text adventure with lots of dead ends. The ****ing trap would turn you into a hamster and you would have to travel to some far a away place to be healed. If you can be healed. They would seal you in another dimension forever. Make you sick. Release monsters. Flood the entire dungeon. But for now I'm OK with traps as they are. Combined with injuries they make far more sense then before, when they just did damage that I didn't really care about. If you want a fast game play Diablo. I do feel better about traps in Pillars now. Because you've just shown that they could be much, much worse. So, mission accomplished? I guess. The idea of passive obstacles is perfectly fine. Their implementation as ubiquitous landmines you can only interact with in a single way is not.

Traps have to be there, because they are cool. In what possible way are they cool? There are only two outcomes a trap can have. Either you have a high enough skill to disarm them, or one of your characters takes an injury. Or you very carefully edge your way around it, which does absolutely nothing except slow down the game.

I imagine that there would still be a check/roll against defenses in there somewhere. A high-deflection character should have a decent chance of walking through a basic dart trap unscathed. I don't find Traps to be a particularly fun mechanic to deal with (I hated Durlag's Tower), but they're probably too tied to the audience's expectations for the genre to toss now. I'll be happy if Deadfire makes incremental progress by removing the XP for disarming them. Traps are definitely something that has to be there because it always has. Unfortunate, really. They're nothing but a skill tax.

That's most likely it, yes. Placing it after the main campaign would necessitate a lot of variables. Some NPCs may or may not still be with you, may or may not be dead... and so on. A tribute to Tales of the Sword Coast isn't a very good reason, since ToSC was kind of bad. And part of it was suddenly yanking you away from the main plot to entirely different places.

Welp, I faintly hoped they'd dump traps in the garbage, where they belong. Having them inflict injuries actually makes them worse, since you can't just face-tank the damage if you don't have as high a Mechanics score as the game expects you to have.

Taunting is a way to compensate for AI limitations. Ideally, a tank tanks by being too dangerous to ignore and punishing you for going straight for the squishier targets. But that doesn't work too well with AI-controlled enemies, as opposed to real players. I'm glad Deadfire continues to pursue different ways of doing it, though.

The buffet-style multiclassing has been resoundingly proven not to work, so I hope they don't use it.

Indeed, but RPGs have a lot of baked-in assumptions that endure because they always have, and people don't think twice about them.

One of the greatest things about Pillars is that it doesn't care about the knee-jerk reaction to some class/equipment combinations being "wrong".

I think the most common use for this would be a shield-using warrior switching between two weapons with different damage types. Like Eder with a sabre and a club. He needed a different shied to go with the club, and in PoE2 he won't,

Man, the quote function on those forums is bad. Anyway, I'm not really talking about how efficient ex-Vancian casters will be. I'm talking from the position of comfort and ease of play. Of course, not operating on a completely different timetable will make them much easier to balance. As far as the priest/paladin dagger goes... I wouldn't assume any given ability works the same as it does in PoE 1. Particularly spells, since they're per-encounter now. And there will certainly be new ones.

Why wouldn't you want to build your party to pass every skill check? The point of having a party game with intricate character building tools is to create a well-rounded team that can handle every challenge. More participation from your team in conversations and interactions is a good thing. It's always been a problem with social skills in such games that only the PC could actually use them. And if you don't feel like an option your character qualifies for fits them... don't choose it. It's as simple as that. But maybe don't demand that the devs cut options to preserve your sense of role-playing. Which looks to be very fragile and easily-disrupted, given what it apparently takes to ruin it.

I really like seeing the per-encounter spells in the video. It'll be so nice to be able to actually use the spells I want as a wizard, without worrying that I might need them later.

The only thing to stop pick-pocketing would be role playing. Maybe you dont steal in general or you dont steal from your allies but your enemies. I try to come to games like this with that in mind. If they do it like lock picks where it warns you you dont have enough skill to succeed then you wouldnt need save scrumming. "Well, maybe the players won't use it" is a very bad way to balance a mechanic. If it exists, it will be used. Treating pockets as locks would prevent save-scumming, indeed, but it opens up a new problem. Maybe only some NPCs will have stuff worth taking? So it becomes a possible solution to a quest step. As for a dagger that binds with paladins and priests... I see nothing wrong with it, although I am curious as to what its story will be. An artifact of Skaen, maybe? A sacrificial dagger?

The character who did the actual pickpocketing and lockpicking seemed to have been a ranger. There's no reason a barbarian can't have high stealth, mind you. They don't get a bonus, but they can still put points there. Pickpocketing does tend to have a very high requirement for actually working, but more importantly, it encourages, or outright requires save-scumming. If it doesn't work, the NPC gets angry, but you can just reload and try again. So I suspect it'll work like actual locks, in that every NPC will have a set difficulty. Of course, in that case, what's to stop the player from clearing out everyone they meet, if they have enough Mechanics?

Was there already pickpocketing in Pillars 1, like we see on the video? I never used it, if so, and I can't remember a game where it actually worked.

I also like it. I feel like it's a compromise between the old-school, unforgiving system where wounds are forever until you spend resources, and the more modern style, where you're back to full strength after every fight. That said, it took me a while to get just how damage is applied to both pools. Last I've heard, they're going for something more similar to Tyranny in Deadfire?

We were somewhat spoiled by the ability to actually control what items we get, yes. I loathe crafting in most games, but its purpose, which is letting the player customize their equipment, is good. It's just that most games waste it.

Yhh, it depends. If you enchant your own weapon starting from a scratch I like the idea of the weapon growing with you. Gaining fame, and special abilities. As far as cRPGs go, when you find "legendary" weapon I prefer for it to have story of its own and abilities connected to its origin. To me its way more interesting. But I am more of a story guy. Games based on loot (Diablo, Torchlight) I find very very boring. Weapons in PoE were very very boring until they introduced soulbound weapons. All I want from an equipment system is to be unobtrusive. A precious few games manage that, unfortunately. Getting a weapon and upgrading it as I see fit would be great.

I really, really do not care about unique items. Equipment are tools, I can't be excited about them. What I want is to have options. When I build my character, I also want to adjust their tools. Not... use whichever the best unique item for their chosen category happens to be.

Unique magic weapons with abilities that match their stories are a great, immersion-intensifying idea, in theory. In practice, they're a big pain in the ass for players. Better hope the unique super-weapons for your chosen category have abilities that match your character idea. Otherwise, tough luck. Oh, and also better hope they're not in an area you visit late.

Adding dialogue for an item that the player may or may not find, may or may not use and may or may not have replaced by the time they reach that NPC strikes me as a waste of the writers and programmers' valuable time. Everything is pretty vague right now, so I guess we need to trust the devs that they won't repeat the BG2 situation, where the efficiency of a weapon type depends on how quickly you can find a unique piece of it. In Pillars 1, I couldn't find a good crossbow for a while, so I just enchanted a generic one with Fine/Exceptional, Kith Slaying and Acid Lash. And that was fine.