MortyTheGobbo

I feel bad for Obsidian sometimes. Some things in Deadfire work, others don't... but no matter what they do, people will still sigh wistfully for a 15+ year old game based on a cut-up version of a terrible tabletop ruleset. Pillars' mechanics have their foibles, but at least Deflection doesn't stop mattering halfway through and Intelligence is actually useful to wizards. I love Baldur's Gate 2 and I always will, but I've long since chosen not to compare every game to my memories of it.

well totally useless is my initial reaction and probably slight exaggeration. the 4s stun is really quite nice but i find it too short and if it deals primary attack or maybe full attack on the target and aoe stun that will be nice for me. full attack just up the resource cost so you cant spam. If your initial reaction to an ability being nerfed is "totally useless now" it might be a good idea to take a breath double-check your thinking.

Something I didn't appreciate until now was just how hilarious it was to be lectured about entitlement by someone who expects special treatment for clicking a box labelled "wizard" during character generation.

I suppose it might not be a bad idea if, for some reason, you wanted to completely remove any kind of choice for those classes when levelling up and make keeping more than one party member with those classes highly questionable. Besides, Obsidian will have their hands full actually balancing the abilities classes do have.

Yeah, the best defence is often a good offence and all that. On Veteran, the first pack of boars and drakes was giving me trouble, and Eder didn't make it. So I might reload and give my wolf Vicious Companion instead so it kills them quickly.

I took the resilient companion passive, see if it helps. And I suppose I should send it after my other melee fighters have rushed in... which right now would be Eder, so that's part of the problem.

So I just started another playthrough. Orlan sharpshooter. I'm happy to say that Veteran is actually challenging now - enough for me to switch to Classic in some places, before I have a fuller party. But even a proper difficulty level can't justify how stupidly fragile my ranger's wolf companion is. It goes down in a few hits, even on Classic. On Veteran, it's even quicker. Am I going to have to invest in talents just so it doesn't keel over so easily? There's not even that many talents to do that, only the increased DR one.

That's because that's what actually happens, not what OP thinks happens. Rogues also have an ability to vanish, teleport around a group of mobs, attack all of them instantly, and then re-appear back in front of their target. Warriors also have Heroic Leap, which is essentially identical to POE Barbarian Leap. I have played WOW off & on since launch, and last played a rogue & warrior and personally used all of these abilities about 3 mo. ago. Anyway, I'm just going to re-iterate my previous post & leave this here: Ok yall win, everyones a mage. Yay. Delete the mage class plz Yall have finally convinced me. The wizard is nothing special, he just does more of what everyone else does already. Got it. Heard. I will go play a barb No one except yourself has argued that everyone is a mage or that wizards aren't special. So you've effectively won an argument against yourself, with arguments you made but no one else has.

Dragon Age is actually a very good example of how not to handle that. They created a world where magic is scary and unknown and muggles have to create a whole force of warriors who get hooked on magic heroin to counter mages... but then it slaps a generic RPG gameplay on it, with three classes, three races and a MMO-lite combat system. So either warriors and rogues are fifth wheels in their own party, like in Origins, or they have to pull off superhuman stunts, like in DA2 and DA:I, which the writing and world-building pretend really hard they cannot do. But I see this thread has devolved into whinging about how "this generation" is the absolute worst for not abiding by the OP's personal taste, so there's very little to be said that will be remotely productive.

I mean... D&D fighters don't kick ass. They're frankly pathetic when compared when anything remotely magical. That's why we're having this discussion. Anyway, this thread starts out from a somewhat understandable premise and then wades deep into hysterical hyperbole and wild false equivalences. A fighter can do things that aren't really humanly possible. Like pulling people to them. Which is mostly a gameplay abstraction of a fighter sticking close to enemies, because it's easier to represent. How is this remotely the same thing as the wizard having a dozen different spells to throw around elements, turn enemies to stone or summon a cloud of poison? Can a fighter do that? Can a rogue? Can a barbarian summon monsters and revive their allies? They can't. So how are they "the same", just because they all do powerful and awesome things? I mean, really. What can a fighter do? Strike accurately, strike hard, defend themselves expertly, charge across the battlefield... those are normal combat skills writ large. The only outlier is Get Over Here, which is again an abstraction of the push and pull of a battlefield. What about rogues? Jumping around and stabbing or shooting people. Not sure what the big deal is. There's once again one thing that might be strange, which is invisibility. But, again, abstraction. Barbarians get angry, scare people and hit things. I suppose they're more overtly supernatural than those two, but again - jumping in the middle of enemies, getting super angry and yelling at them is hardly magic. It's not normal, but it's not magic. Compare that to even half of a wizard or cleric's repertoire. Can you honestly call them the same, without indulging in ridiculous hyperbole? The game does have the usual disassociation where the writing and the setting don't really acknowledge the superhuman things people can do without magic. It's a problem, but honestly I don't care about it that much. But it's the way things go. In a game like Pillars, if you want your non-magical characters to have interesting and varied abilities, you're going to have to abandon realism to some degree. Getting bit by a dragon and surviving is hardly realistic either, and yet people don't complain about that. If you wanted those classes to remain "normal" and "not magic", you'd have to cut most of the magic-using classes' power in half, because otherwise there's no way the fighters and rogues can be relevant. You'll also have to give up on fighting dragons, giants and other mythic monsters, because there's no way for "normal" people to go toe to toe with them. You'd basically have to cut most of the game's progression in half and stick to low-powered plots and challenges.

It seems some of my characters are permanently affected by the "slog zone" effect after visiting a swamp. Fassina and Serafen, to be specific. I don't know why the other characters who were there don't have that problem. Resting doesn't seem to help.

So how do you explain carrying a dozen weapons and armor sets long before getting a magical bag?

In Deadfire, you mean? In Pillars 1 it was probably due to stronghold adventures, but I have no clue how it'd happen in Deadfire.

5e D&D has absolutely not "fixed" the problem of dump stats, neither has any other edition of D&D. In fact, 5e rendered Intelligence a dump stat for every class that's not a wizard - because there's no skill points anymore and only a handful of spells and monsters enforce Intelligence saves. So dumping it to 8 on your fighter, rogue or cleric just isn't going to affect you in any way 90% of the time. Saves could have changed that, but they're victim to the same kind of sloppy and lazy design that pervades 5e in general, so Con, Wis and Dex saves outnumber the others massively. Like in every other version of D&D, your attribute selection is going to depend on your class and little else. You could cut stats out of 5e D&D entirely and lose nothing. Pillars' stats are, honestly, bog-standard. Dexterity makes you quick? Check. Perception helps you hit and spot things? Check. Constitution makes you tougher? Check. Intelligence helps with special abilities? Check. Resolve is basically renamed willpower and very niche as usual. The only outlier is Might. Which, again, solves a very specific problem that's present in many RPGs - where strength just isn't going to be useful unless you're a hand-to-hand fighter. And even then, you don't necessarily need to focus on it. Even D&D eventually stopped insisting that every melee fighter be a muscle-bound oaf. As far as inventory goes... the only "realistic" way to handle it would be not to let us carry much of anything. Which I'm absolutely, totally fine with and I sorely miss Witcher 1's inventory that did just that. Or Mass Effect 2 and 3, which just had us equip for missions. But if we are going to hoover up crap from our victims enemies, then carrying around 8 halberds isn't substantially more realistic than carrying 16. It has no rational explanation anyway.

I have no idea either. I could use the console to match their XP with mine, but it does feel like cheating.

Sneak attack works from range just fine. It's Backstab that requires you to be up close. As far as I can tell all rogue abilities work with any weapon. Ranger abilities obviously work, except for one high-level ability.

Man, why is it always mages that people whinge about with regards to Might? Why is it never archers, gunners, crossbow-users or rapier-wielders, even though they should also benefit little from physical strength? Right, because people are super-invested in the image of a frail but powerful nerd superhero and their immersion shatters when that's impossible. Or at least, that's the only explanation that makes sense to me. Might is clumsy, but it's an answer to an age-old problem where strength just isn't useful to many characters. Maybe it's not a very good answer and they should have done something different. Does Pillars even need attributes, at all? There's enough moving parts without them. But maybe it does, and if that's the case, then we should avoid attributes that don't do zilch for 50% of potential characters.

I feel like teammates we leave behind fall off in terms of XP far more harshly than in Pillars. With only five active party members and lack of stronghold adventures, people I didn't take along so often can be two or three levels behind when I do pick them. Is there any reason everyone in the team doesn't just share the Watcher's XP gain?

Do you mean his romance only has 2 conversations? I admit I could only trigger it by using the console, so it only actually happened right before the end quest, so I put it down to having missed most of it. Its... not really that there are two conversations, its that its extremely low key. Its adorable though, if anything I prefer it over Tekehu's (and I love Tekehu with all my heart). Since its so not "in-your-face" it compensates with quite a bit of ambient dialogue from Aloth which is only romance-related, as well as changes in his reactions to certain places and situations. The last conversation in Ukaizo is unbearably sweet. Idk its definitely not Bioware scale or even Tekehu/Xoti in terms of content and flirts, but it fits his character, and if you like his character its good enough imho. If anything it revolves completely around your PC. Of course there could always be more content everywhere, but I thought its worth having even as is. But then I am biased towards long-term companion friednships and history so Aloth will always be default for my character. If you are looking for more written content then it could seem underwhelming. If you tell her you are interested in her then yeah, you are automatically locked with her until you break up. She shows interest in +1 disposition convo as far as I remember. But I can break up with her and pursue some other romance, right? I mean, "break up" isn't the right phrase, I guess...

I've been told that after the first conversation with Maia I've locked myself away from other companions' romances. Can anyone confirm? I haven't bought Ishiza shark meat yet, and I still get the option to break it off. So it'd feel kind of odd.

Does it happen if the Watcher is a paladin as well? Or a mercenary?

It seems that my main character is affected by Pallegina's auras even after she switched to another one, or isn't in the active party at all.

I never used grimoires in Pillars, because the casting delay was too long. But it did eventually let Aloth learn every spell there was. To contrast, in Deadfire I actually swap out grimoires from time to time. That's an improvement in my book, but I agree that letting us rename them and show more clearly which of those spells we already know would help.

Are we still arguing about the "might is soul power" thing? RPGs with bog-standard strength stats have allowed female characters with the exact same attribute spread as male ones since pretty much forever, with the exception of Arcanum... and even there, that 1 isn't going to make that much of a difference. And yet, it's suddenly a problem now.

They supplement the spells wizards learn from levelling. You can cast any that you've picked on level-ups, plus any in your equipped grimoire. I've found them much more practical than in PoE 1, to be honest.