MortyTheGobbo

I can't find the post now, but Josh did say adding multiple body types to all the five races (six if you count godlike) would be too much effort and resources.

My stance on the health/endurance system is that it was a good idea but didn't really shake out too well in play. In concept, it's a middle ground between the old-school unforgiving attrition (which can go die in a big fire) and the more modern model where health goes back after every fight (which is much better but has issues on its own). In practice, though, it just felt randomly punishing. Rather than slowly wear down our party, what happened most of the time was that one party member got focus-fired and lost a bunch of health. Often a spellcaster or a less tanky frontliner. And then everyone had to rest even if the other characters were doing fine. Unless of course you rested to get the per-rest spells back. I'm so glad those are gone. I do wish they'd found a way to make it work. Plenty of games use two health pools, one that's easy come easy go and one that can't be regained so easily. 4E D&D has a good take on it with healing surges, which mean that while healers' ability to heal is only limited on a per-encounter basis, everyone's capacity to be healed is capped between long rests. I have no idea how they'd translate that to Pillars, though. So I can't really blame them for just going with what works. I don't exactly mind resting rarely. It feels weird to just lie down and sleep eight hours in the middle of an adventure.

I'm not so much a hoarder as I tend to just forget I even have all that crap, unless a fight comes up when I specifically need this particular consumable. Which in Pillars was mostly resistance scrolls. So yeah, making them per-encounter resources or something might have helped that, but as it is, I'll continue to forget I have them. Oh well. This is also a pretty specific thing to tiptoe around traditionalists over... you'd think all the other heresies against the Holy Canon of RPG Design would have made per-encounter potions small by comparison.

I think Mass Effect 3 was great! Ok that's a lie, I think it was better than people said, but it is the worst real Mass Effect game. On a 10 scale I would give it like a 7. I refuse to count Andromeda as a Mass Effect game by the way . It was such a let down after 1 and 2 though. Yes, Andromeda does not exist, let us not speak of it. Andromeda was the best ME game.(Though as many games do, it falls apart in the final act) ME1 fondness is mostly nostalgia and posturing at this point. Replaying it , it's a fairly hollow series of fetch quests. I wouldn't put it this harshly, maybe, but I agree. I replayed ME2 and ME3 recently and they were fun, even though cracks begin to show. ME1, though? I just can't get past the early game nowadays. ME1 gave us an interesting, vivacious space opera setting, and then introduced a villain that completely eclipsed every single other thing inside it right around the middle. It made it very difficult to follow up on that. ME2 does its best by basically having us to prepwork for the whole duration... which, coincidentally, shows off its setting. ME3 had to finally have the big god-machines from outer space come calling, and that was that.

Doesn't the pistol's modal make it work as a club? I seem to remember something like that. If so, then presumably you'd shoot and them switch to its "melee mode".

Mass Effect 1 was a good game. At the time. It's aged poorly. Mass Effect 2 and 3 have their problems, but at least they don't have an early game that puts me to sleep and a late game that breaks in ways unimaginable. Endings aside, ME3's problems mostly come out in hindsight. Story problems, that is - its gameplay is better than the previous games'. Though it's not hard to be better than ME1's weird unbalanced shooter/RPG mix. And ME3's story problems were mostly a result of the series' fundamental issues that the game could no longer avoid. Andromeda is an okay game dogged by problems, not the Antichrist it's trendy to paint it as. But the Internet echo chamber is what it is.

I guess they were worried dual-wielding would feel wasted when executing such attacks, but considering that you've got a handful of them per encounter and then it's back to auto-attacking... it puzzles me.

Yeah, I got a lot of mileage out of Maneha with an Overbearing axe. I always felt like the full attacks' favoring of dual-wielding was excessive, but what can you do. Props to Pillars for remembering the one-handed style, but I guess it's still niche. Maybe I'll try it in Deadfire just to see what happens.

Pretty much what I figured. I'm really not fond of how special abilities favour dual-wielding. Hopefully it's better in Deadfire, but that's not the section for it. What would happen if we had a rogue one-hand a sword?

This is mostly a theoretical question, since I'm not going to start a new playthrough before Deadfire comes out, but... I've wondered how viable a fighter with a single one-handed sword would be. Or rather, how strong - since on Normal difficulty, just about anything will work fine enough. As I see it, swords aren't very optimal for this style, because there aren't any with powers that trigger on a critical hit. I once had Maneha one-hand We Toki and it was a fine knockdown-inflicting machine. A fighter has no carnage, but more accuracy and Disciplined Barrage, so a single-handed weapon that stuns or knocks down on crit might work. But there's no swords that do it.

The designers had a very clear problem in front of them - Pillars' combat involved too much micromanagment with six characters, and Deadfire was going to add more fiddly bits to some classes. So they opted to reduce the number. I see a lot of complaining about how it's a "cheap" solution, but precious few alternatives.

I started playing Baldur's Gate from the second game, because that's the one I happened to run into. I didn't really have any trouble. The NPCs that actually stick around explain who they are and those that don't... well, they're not super relevant. Starting a game series in the middle happens quite often.

I don't think I'm ever going to do an all single-class playthrough. Some of my people will be single-class, some multi-class. My first character will be a fighter/rogue, having been a fighter in PoE. My second will be a straight ranger, having been a rogue before. Though I'd like to see if rogues actually have something impressive on top levels this time. Rangers actually do have some useful tricks there in Pillars.

I'm not super stoked about it, honestly. The more you voice everyone else, the stranger it feels for the main character to be silent. But then, Deadfire is still in an isometric style, so at least we won't be playing a silent, blank mannequin among fully-voiced and animated NPCs (looking at you here, Dragon Age Origins and KOTOR).

His comments boiled down to "it would take a metric crapton of work and resources", though.

Considering intelligence was entirely useless to any class other than Mage in BG2, I think SonicMage is joking.

Gameplaywise though, especially combat - I felt Divinity to be quite restrictive. It has a “feeling” of choice, because it’s a classless system. Instead of deciding if you are a ranger, or wizard, or priest type character you decide more as you go on. However, within one archetype I found the choices to be quite limited. Plus there's some tactics that are just better than others in terms of dealing with the game's difficulty and scaling.

Having just finished a full PoE run as a druid, I have to agree. I had a few spells that I liked to use because they were strong or just suited my preferred tactics. Everything else was used on a rainy day, or in specific circumstances. I do worry about no-brainer choices in Deadfire, mind you.

I'm pretty sure everyone is concerned about it to some degree.

I had some fun giving her a war bow and just having her snipe from the back line. Though her body has some serious recovery penalty, so she actually fires quite slow with it. Perhaps a hunting bow would've been better. Still, using Runner's Wounding Shot with Borresaine was a reliable stun. Getting Deathblows is trickier than it looks, but doable.

I'll be running a fighter/rogue with a greatsword on my first run of Deadfire, so I kind of feel like I want Eder to be a pure fighter. Maybe a tank with a shield, but I don't know if it'll be less passive in Deadfire than it was in Pillars. Or I can make him a pure rogue and my Watcher's DPS buddy.

The fact that we can pick the companions' classes to a degree is going to change much. In my current playthrough, I don't bring Hiravias along much because my Watcher is also a druid, and druids don't get much variety. In Deadfire, a companion/sidekick with a "duplicate" class can be turned into a multiclass or another class.

Interesting. Let's hope it works to make it more useful.

Did they decide to have Resolve reduce condition duration after all? This post seems to imply they did.

Well, I certainly wish I'd known that before. Oh well. Maybe I'll still have him use the invocation on some trash enemies just to try it out.