tela2k

I'm totally for the new system of one regenerating health pool and injuries, good food items just need to be scarcer. Like stated by others the new combat system just doesn't come into full effect because of the low difficulty. There are a lot of engaging new mechanics that I can see making combat actually very exciting at best. Off the top of my head: -Prepping mobs for that sick cleaving stance strike. -Improved in and out of stealth Assassin -Improved mobility abilites to various classes giving the fights sometimes even a Diabloesque feeling (man did I love the couple first insanely difficult patches of D3). -Inspiration/affliction mechanic doesn't really get to shine yet since most mobs just don't have any afflictions to cast or don't use them properly. -Many of the new when Bloodied or Near Death effects should also make for some pretty tense moments where you either destroy or get destroyed. -New interrupt mechanic could make canceling that Dragon Breath or Gaze of Adragan or whatever pretty engaging. Getting to use all your stuff in every fight instead of sitting on your abilites and using minimal resources to slay trash pack after trash pack, waiting for that one tough fight actually enables the devs, if they want to, to make every fight difficult enough for you to actually have to use the abilties you have. The majority of fights should now be a lot more intense when the balance is right. The new health mechanic also enables this, since in the old system if there were too many tough fights in a row you'd have to go back and get some more camping supplies and then come back to the same dungeon, or they just had to fill the dungeon with camping supplies, so whatever. Now you can almost get wiped in every fight, but just come on top by the skin of your teeth and have another one like that around the corner. To me that sounds fantastic. Can't really say for now, since I played through only once and the difficulty is what it is, but the biggest risk I see honestly, since you'll have less active abilities the other side of the coin for getting to spam your stuff is you won't have those long pauses where you finally find that perfect ability just for this situation. So maybe less strategy with ability choices and more importance on how you use the abilities that you have. The other thing is some of the food items are just ridiculously overpowered. Immunity to three afflictions, that's like a Protection from magic scroll, please no. Also empower is kind of a weird get out of jail free card.

In my head always sounds like the Swedish pronunciation of vampire. https://en.bab.la/dictionary/swedish-english/vampyr

My guess is people who got Huana leader fight in Ukaizo gave the Ukaizo map from the quest to the prince? Because I just kept it, avoided the Rauataians and never gave it to the Huana either, effectively just failing the quest and I got the Rauatai admiral both with Principi and going solo. Oddly enough too Maia didn't comment on killing her high commander at all.

Well overall I think Deadfire was a huge improvement in sound design. Sound effects, music and the full VO made me play with my better headphones on the whole way. Only thing really on my personal wishlist is a more bombastic main theme, because I'm just a total sucker for the TES: Oblivion or BG2: SoA themes. I mean you can't listen to them for very long, but they do get you pumped and ready to slay some kobolds.

I'd asstimate anything from 20 to 50%. I'll just say a lot more than I thought, since the city is much larger than I expected. I binged the whole game and I think I spent the first two days only in Neketaka before jumping on my ship and going exploring. Even after that you always return there for quests for three factions and bounties and shops so yeah. A large portion of the game, so fortunately I personally loved Neketaka

The difficulty has a lot to do with all the problems in the game. Quests feel shorter, stakes lower, rewards less satisfying, character building less meaningful and indeed the world too open. Just waiting for the potd patch to hit so I can start my second playthrough. Thing is though, I had Tekehu, Pallegina and Maia in my party on my first playthrough and having them bring the point of view of three factions into many quests was so good that I actually feel like I have to have them on the second playthrough too, since the factions are such a large part of the game. With that in mind there is always only one spot to swap around in my party.

Yeah I guess for that (Warlock?) it would really be worth it to just have a priest cast an int inspiration (I think they're all single target unfortunately) on you at the beginning of every fight. All of the wizard spells being FoF sounds pretty crazy Could try it with my beloved Helwalker. Evoker/Helwalker whatever the mc combo is called. Tenacious, quick, smart, might from helwalker, acc from dance, int from duality. Also procs wellspring of life for nature godlike, which is great. Monk would eat all your ability points though just PL4 takes takes 4-5 ability points, but I'm sure there's a grimoire out there with most of the stuff you need anyhow. Sure why not. A lot of great defensive buffs. Riposte might even do something in that build (yay). Citzals martial power is really late into the game unfortunately.

I thought people played Spellblade as assassin/evoker critting with fireballs from stealth or some such, not as a martial class? I mean would you really end up using citzals martial power at max lvl?

Played through the game on PotD with a Helwalker/Streetfighter and it wasn't nearly as squishy as I thought it would be. After getting some dmg reduction on low health and legendary heavy armor he was unkillable. Synergy isn't as good but I think Helwalker/Soul Blade should also work, just needs some heavy armor I think. Although the difficulty changes might change it's viability quite a bit. From runs I did in backer beta Helwalker seems to synergize incredibly well with any caster class if you want to go that route. Dance of death gives you wounds without taking damage +12ACC and you get all the sweet monk self buffs. Could go Helwalker/Ascendant. Or why not Shattered Pillar too and I'm sure Beguiler and basic Cipher work just as well. These would be ranged builds by nature though I think. So in short: I'm sure Cipher/Monk is very strong no matter how you build it, because monk self buffs just are so insane.

Went it alone but unfortunately left all the factions alive. Next time I'll correct that mistake and bring everlasting peace and prosperity to the Deadfire.

1. Give enemies more penetration or increase recovery malus on heavy armor. So either make it so there is a good reason to use medium or light armor for frontliners for damage reasons, or make enemies pierce heavy armor so it doesn't feel like IDDQD. 2. I really like the idea people have been throwing around about Berath's Curses. Macro maluses on gold and xp and optional extra abilites to enemies, extra enemies, extra penetration or armor or health or stats or whatever to enemies from the start of the game would be great. Gives the player a lot of room to fit the difficulty to suit their personal taste. 3. Agree on removing empower. I. Hate. It. It's so gimmicky, it doesn't make sense lorewise and feels unsatisfying. Resting is fine, not the greatest mechanic, but they just have to make high tier food extremely rare and up the difficulty enough to prebuff with Captain's Banquet or whatever and to make it feel like you're strategically using a rare resource. Injuries is harder to fix, you can always just hardtack them away, unless there are multiple tough fights in a row so you wouldn't want to rest to keep your Captain's Banquet buff. This unfortunately is probably not going to happen anymore as they've designed this abomination into the ability trees. (Apologies for the mean words, but I really dislike it) 4. Super Enemies. At the current moment there just aren't any scary fights in the game, and even after all the difficulty changes there won't be more than a couple challenging fights anyhow unless they make some pretty radical changes. I guess this is probably DLC stuff but I really like some Twisted Rune/Kangaxx/Firkraag/Llengrath/Alpine Dragon/Adra Dragon content, that's completely optional but really puts your party to the test and gives the best rewards. Or if possible XCOM2: WotC style Pirate Lords or something who keep on being a pain and humiliating you until you're strong enough to take them on. Taking down a Chosen in XCOM2 feels like a massive step forward everytime. At least some kind of strong late game enemies are needed anyhow.

Now that I think of it there is something interesting in the ME2 comparison. Even though to me the ME2 story has always felt like just a random reason to gather a squad so you get to do all these cool companion missions and loyalty missions, the final mission is actually fantastic. I mean it's utterly shameless and childish sure, but it has everything to do with what you have been doing all game. From the start of the game you know your goal: take on the Collector homeworld. So you know why you are gathering a squad, upgrading your gear, upgrading your ship and taking care of all the emotional baggage of your squad, because you're going on a suicide mission. And everytime I've played ME2, it's actually felt great starting the suicide mission. Everything is ready, let's do this ****. And the outcome of the mission is actually affected by everything you've done earlier in the game. Writing wise it might be very uninspiried but execution wise it's brilliant. (Excluding the abomination at the very end.) When it comes to Deadfire, I'm pretty sure I'll replay the game a couple more times at some point, and I'm excited to see all the DLC stuff, try Berath's Curses if they end up making those, build ridiculously OP characters and just generally screw around in the archipelago, but I'm not sure I'll ever finish the main quest again. There's just no reason really, it doesn't have anything to do with anything. But again, it might be just me, could be other people cared about the main questline a lot more than I did.

I think the problem is, if you create a new protagonist then you need to come up with a new excuse why he/she gets involved in everything. The player would already from the first game know everything about the gods, but the new character wouldn't so there would have to be some pretty lame story where your character learns all the stuff you already know if you played the first game. The advantage of the Watcher is that they already know all this and you can just get to new stuff straight away. The good thing would be that maybe you could already be in the Deadfire Archipelago for whatever reason, learn to care about something and THEN they make it personal with a crisis of some sort. Or the F:NV style character where you just get involved in the local politics and completely scrap the Gods plotline from the story or make it a discovery kind of sidestory thing. The Watcher however, being the open kind of character that it is, has very few personal reasons to get involved. The only things that they have after PoE1 for certain are Caed Nua and their life (unless you died in WM2 obviously). So that is what they take away from you to make it personal, your castle and since you can't play a character that is dead, your soul. And then you are forced by Berath (unless you say, no I don't want to play this game) to take part in all the stuff in Deadfire. So from the writers point of view it makes perfect sense for the protagonist to be the Watcher, but from the players point of view it isn't as clear as to why we would be motivated to do anything at all. You don't really get to affect at all how the main story plays out and the only point of satisfaction you get is getting your soul back, which only works if as a player you care about it. I didn't. So then who am I and why am I doing any of the stuff I am doing?

Here is the thing: this is Obsidian. Whenever they succeed or not they always want give you space to roleplay. At the same time they need to give you a hook, which forces whatever character you choose to play as to follow the story. That the trick with player-motivated protagonists. You can’t define what they care about. You can try to make them care about the one specific thing you want, or you can give him premade protagonist you cares about stuff you might not (Geralt, Shepard). The intention isn’t for your Watcher to want revenge on Eothas. You can be pissed, you can want to be left alone, you can support his actions. He isn’t Irenicus designed to be an antagonist. Eothas’ attack on your keep forces you to follow him (or not - you do have an option to leave him be and die) and reasons for it are your own to make. No matter whose you choose to play it, what are your personal goals and world views, following Eothas makes sense. It’s a good hook. It’s your job to roleplay. If Eothas indeed isn’t interesting later in the story, that is a shame. I am hoping for some serious dilemma regarding stopping him. I get that, but there is a price to pay for maximising roleplaying space and there is a limit how much you can just leave to the imagination of the player. You also need to give them ample opportunities to show what kind of character they are. And not just that you can pick from aggressive/honest/clever/passionate/whatever, but there needs to be choice and consequence too. The actual roleplaying happens mostly in the faction quests, not the main quest. Since this is the no spoilers section I won't say more, and I hope it's just me and you found the main quest engaging. Why IS this in the no spoilers section btw?

I think you're right about BG1, you could remove the Gorion murder from the beginning and nothing would change for the player. At leeast for me I think it originally felt more like a detective story, where you try to find out what is behind the iron crisis and why. The framing for murder part at the half point is pretty good but yeah mostly the story doesn't give you much reason to care about anything. But BG2 does give you a lot of reason to care. Not going to write it again, I think I've already said this so many times in different threads including this, but BG2's story is not just well written but well executed in-game. PoEs might be well written or not but it at least is badly executed. And I don't think it should take 10 hours of cutscenes to make you care about at least the main plot points.

I always thought Thaos is just mostly wasted potential. The basic idea for the character is actually very cool, I mean a guy that has the knowledge of thousands of years, makes plans that take centuries to come to fruition and can posess people and vessels does tickle my imagination. Unfortunately he only shows anything about this part of himself twice in the whole game. We learn about him mostly from Old Exposition Lady and Ghostly Exposition Lady and when we see him he's usually talking to someone else or torturing GEL who we really don't have any reason to care about. And about Eothas and the soul stealing stuff. You don't as a player have very strong feelings for Eothas, if any feelings at all. You're told he took your soul. You tell other people this is what happened. You have no one to relate to about this and most of what you do doesn't seem connected to the soul anyhow, so even the story doesn't seem to care about your soul. Ryz brought up the Irenicus soul stealing moment which goes like this: You already hate the man from the very beginning of the game, and every time you try to rest he's there lecturing you with his bs. You get to Spellhold you think you'll get satisfaction. Instead you find out you've been tricked and you get to watch another scene where this arrogant pos goads you and now steals your and Imoen's soul. (You also get a pretty cool mirror fight) After that you have Imoen to relate to, Bodhi mocking you about the souls, and pretty much everything in the game after that is focused on reaching Irenicus and getting your soul back AND the dreams get quite bad after that. Also the dreams are actually shown instead of telling you in purple text that you're having a bad dream. PoE just really fails at making you care about your characters goals in both games. I think this is really the reason people have such strong feelings about the length of the main story in Deadfire. It's not that it's short, it's just disappointing. All the time you are waiting, hoping that it will get exciting at some point and when it ends you just feel let down. The best parts about Deadfire are the companion quests and the faction quests and dispositions and that is pretty much all tied to the companions too. Thus it's a lot easier to care about your companions, because their quests and quests related to them make you care about them for good or bad, but your own questline -the main quest- fails, kind of making the main character fail with it. So for me the right way to play Deadfire is just ignore the main questline and consider the companion and faction questlines the meat of the game. It does make the game feel like it kind of lacks a goal, but the meat is mostly so good that I'm fine with it. Edit: typos everytime

I like the idea but not the execution. The last thing I want to do is nerf my party. I'd rather go with macro nerfs like -50% gold -30% xp or something. Or monster buffs like +10 enemy stats or +2 enemy armor rating. Or straight up copy stuff from SCS: +500% hp to dragons, random encounters include high level monsters like fampyrs (tough to implement tho), enemies use high level abilities (pirate wizard will cast meteor shower). Stuff like that.

Interesting conversation, I can attest to feeling like PoE is missing a personal hook, but I honestly just wanted to comment on this (in the quote) You are out for revenge. Everyone around you suffers because of your Bhaal blood, they cling to you only to suffer more, you do not care, because you are cacklingly evil. "I'm looking for a wizard who tortured me and I'm going to murder him." Imoen: "You came for me!" PC: "No I didn't, I came for revenge and now everything is screwed up, find your own way out, brat." Imoen: "You can keep the dragon eggs Mr. Demon Lord in exchange for a crappy halberd!" Murder silver dragon to finish human skin armor. Slay popular ranger and his buddies. Slay Irenicus because he stole your birthright. Also you can surround yourself with a party of psychopaths. Evil is built into the story of the BG-trilogy. You either fight it or embrace it. In PoE it really doesn't make sense to be evil, the blood pool and the thing in Deadfire feel really out of place to me. And you are surrounded by condescending bastards. GM straight up just took and left after I juiced that baby.

As pointed out by others mutliclassing can be pretty crazy with the right synergies. But I'd go as far as say that you don't even need to have any synergy for multiclassing to be worth it for two reasons. 1. For many single classes there are a lot of times I feel there just isn't anything good to take with all those skill points you get. With two classes you have a greater chance of having something worthwile to pick on any given level. 2. Just getting the abilities of an extra class in your party has value in itself. I ended up multiclassing Tekehu and Pallegina both to druid/chanter and paladin/chanter respectively. Why whouldn't you just want free aura buffs for the whole party. There are way too many good chants and invocations to go around for one chanter. You are offering something so powerful to your whole party, that the high level abilities need to be -amazing- to be better than that. I'm actually sure you could make a 5 x/chanter multiclass and it would still be worth it. Paladin is the same thing, even without any class synergy why wouldn't you want a paladin in your party. Probably also druid. You can multiclass it with anything, just go with relentless storm and moon well, do nothing else very druidy, but you are offering an aoe permastun and probably the best heal in the game(?). It might not be optimal, but it doesn't suck. Edit: typos

Oh my.. that is... a terrible idea I don't think I could ever finish that playthrough. Also you're in for a surprise if you romance Aerie. Just saying. Haer'Dalis actually is extremely useful, especially when you get the upgraded bard song he's very powerful.

100% completion with reading/listening to every dialogue but fast moding through all the running and all the combat after Neketaka (Obsidian please..) took me 75h. I even sunk every other ship in the archipelago because the king of pirates doesn't stand for competition. Honestly I don't think you can do more derping around than I did. And when they fix the difficulty the game is going to slow down a lot. Yes, if you compare the main quest to BG2, it is really short, but I don't think it's a fair comparison, because Deadfire is also supposed to be about the factions kind of like New Vegas. The point is, I think, that you do some quests for every faction, decide on which one you want to go with, and that alone takes quite a bit of time. Only then if you're really gonna skip all the side content you go down the main quest line. What I mean is I'd separate the faction content to be different from side content and say that it's all actually supposed to be part of the main quest even if it isn't compulsory. Then there are the compaion quest lines, which I'd guess unless you're speed running, you will do, and they will take more time. Something I'd also consider kind of core quests. And probably not shorter than ME2. It's 80% companion quests 10% main quest and 10% random side content. All in all actually pretty similar to Deadfire in most aspects. If you could skip all the companion stuff then ME2 is just: Lazarus (very short) -> Freedom's Progress (very short) -> Horizon -> Collector Ship -> IFF -> Collector Base. It's only made longer by the fact that it has those weird mission count timers in between the main missions so you can't just zerg it. But without picking a faction and doing no companion quests, yeah, I think speed runs for Deadfire are going to be really quick.

Giggle. Always wondered what people thought of the only romanceable male character. Personally after the first playthrough I've always randomly murdered Anomen just to rid the world of his whining

The list isn't supposed to be exhaustive, just some examples to give an idea of what I'm trying to say. But, yes, I do love me some Geralt, definitely one of my absolute favourite fictional characters. It might really be just about the writing as you say. Like I wrote above the Watcher just doesn't feel to come alive for me. Even in games like the Geneforge series, if anyone has played those, I can imagine what my main characters in those games are like, because the games offer so many possibilities to show their motivations, values and personalities. Something where I actually feel like Jeff failed in his more recent games. The Watcher plays more like a lens through which you see the world, a tool for experiencing the story and ends up being quite bland as a character.

It's such a long time ago that I played Morrowind, but I remember that you were supposed to be the Nerevarine, a prophecised saviour type of some sort in that one too, right? I might be talking out of my ass here, because I mostly remember being able to jump across the island and randomly murdering Vivec and other ridiculous stuff like that about Morrowind, but I'm not sure being Nerevarine is that far away from being the Dragonborn. In both you start as a prisoner and then proceed to find out you have a special destiny to fulfill. Also I don't mean you need to have a Chosen One destiny kind of motivation for the PC, I'm just saying that even if it isn't very inspired, it always at least does it's job and gives the player character some meat and usually explains why they can do all this stuff instead of someone else doing it. I'm totally fine with the Courier from New Vegas, where you're just trying to find out why someone you've never met would shoot you in the face and then get mixed up in all the local politics and slowly gain respect among the different facions for good or bad. I guess it's more that I just find it really hard to put myself into the Watchers shoes, implant any kind of personality on the PC and care about the creeping insanity in the first game or the lost soul in the second game. Same kind of feelings I honestly had about the Fallout 4 protagonist. I couldn't care less about the lost baby (don't know if that's a flaw in the writing or if it makes me a bad person) or about the main character in general. Maybe they could've done more about it by placing more emphasis on your insanity in the first game and actually showing the soul sucking in Deadfire? I don't know if that would solve the lack of personality though, I just feel like the Watcher is just an empty husk, while everyone else in the game world is an actual person. Not a solution to anything, but something I just want to say: Why I mentioned the BG trilogy is I love the way how your Bhaal blood explains everything going to hell all the time. I'm not sure it's so much a Chosen One story, since it's more like a curse on you. No matter how hard you try, especially if you're playing a goodie-two-shoes kind of character, you can't escape the fact that because of your blood your life will be an endless series of disasters until the prophecy is fulfilled in one way or another. Everywhere you go people die, deal with it. Also Irenicus goading you in your dreams all the time gives you quite a many chances to show the alignment of your character, whether you'll embrace your blood or fight it. The Watcher's insanity just kind of is there and doesn't actually do anything. The Watcher's soul missing also doesn't really feel like such a big deal even though I guess it should. So maybe it just comes down to me not finding the Watcher as a concept very interesting. Like I said there are a lot of things I love about these games, but the main character just seems to be missing something. Edit: typos

Now that people have maybe finished the game already, I'd be interested to know how people find the player character in these games after Deadfire. This might just be about my personal preferences, but this is PoEs biggest problem as a series for me, that the Watcher just kind of feels like any other dude, besides some strange psychic abilities. I can't see why the Watcher is the one to do all the world saving. I feel like they tried to address this in Deadfire, but it felt a bit contrived with the Herald of Berath thing and you alone being the one the Gods use as their agent and Eothas presumably only listening to you (didn't listen to me at least). I can't quite put my finger on it but something with the motivations and pretext for the PC just feel off to me. Some examples from other games: BG-trilogy: The Lord of Murder shall perish, but in his death he shall spawn a score of mortal progeny. (PC) Chaos shall be sown in their footsteps. (Can confirm) -Basically the whole metastory of the trilogy revolves around your PC. ME: Is that the kind of person we want protecting the galaxy? That's the only kind of person who can protect the galaxy. -The whole galaxy is full of incompetent sissies, but fortunately you happen to be the biggest badass in history. Also you are the one who knows the truth and because people refuse to listen, you'll have to save the galaxy on your own. So badassery and information. DA:O: You are the last of the Wardens in Ferelden and there's a blight. -You really are the last hope. You don't act and the world is doomed. Pretty simple. DA:I: World is full of demon portals. You are the only glowing-hand-person who can close said portals. -Same thing as DA:O. Skyrim: Super Dragon will destroy the world if a Dragonborn doesn't stop it. You are Dragonborn. -Same thing as above. Fallout 1/2: Your people will die if you don't find plot device. -I mean in the second one you're actually called the Chosen One. Simple but it works. Now that I think about it I actually found Tyranny's PC to be a lot more believable and interesting too. Would have to play through it again to compare the Fatebinder with the Watcher though to better comment on why. Out of these I guess the Watcher would fall most under the Shepard-catergory, where you just happen to be more badass than everyone else, though I don't see what soul reading has to do with that. Information I guess? Is that the reason Berath chose you, cause you know the truth about the gods, is that why Eothas listens to you? And how are they going to go forward to PoE3 with this? Now everyone knows the truth, right? Also kind of the Fallout impersonal you are some dude and you need to reach the plot device (soul)? I don't know maybe I just lack the imagination to fill in the gaps or something. ​