tela2k

Since I can't find the spoiler tag I'll just answer this in short: Safest thing is to upgrade your ship and crew, there's a part that's a bit like ME2 if you've played that one.

Well I get my kicks from beautiful synergy so mostly about mechanics and I've always only played glasscannon/rogue style characters. The one I finished the game on my first playthrough: Helwalker/Streetfighter, Human +might, +dex, +int, +attack speed, -recovery, +critdmg, +firedmg +pen Maximize accuracy and attack speed to get more crits, even riposte actually worked surprisingly well. Swift flurry + heartbeat drumming -> more attacks Hobble on crit from weapon, weaken on crit from passive -> Deathblows activated Not that many good strikes though on this one, I ended up using devastating blow but it seemed a marginal dmg increase. Mostly it was almost as good to let him do basic attacks on his own. Already cried about it in another thread but armor and the dmg reduction on lower health stuff made him unkillable, which kind of took the fun out of it in the end, but can't wait to pit this one against (hopefully) stronger DLC mobs. Inspired by this something I want to try after the balance patches is (if they don't utterly destroy monk) Helwalker/Fury, Nature Godlike Same thing but swift strikes activates wellspring of life and gets wounds from dance of death, use relentless storm, attack from range with shapeshift. Also gets that sweet blink ability and single target lightning thing. Name her Thor or Zeus or Gene or something I guess. Should be pretty cool! TL;DR I love Helwalker

Well if you're still early in the game I'll just say, that to me it felt like there was an on/off switch in the game after you start finding legendary gear. Even without all the crazy legendary effects just that couple of points of pen and armor just seemed to completely trivialise combat. The early game fights are engaging enough and I'm sure if you venture to the high lvl zones early the game can get very punishing. Problem is if you do those early on with consumables and possibly add some cheese on top you'll start finding legendary gear even earlier and thus turn the difficulty switch earlier. And I realise it's a common problem with RPGs that late game stuff just gets really easy if you min/max, but we aren't really talking about late game here, legendary gear is so abundant that it just happens really fast. The game isn't forever ruined or anything, it's actually looking to be a fantastic game, and I have a lot of respect for Obsidian for caring about their games enough to keep tweaking them long after release. But right now the combat just is so poorly balanced that for me the game, despite all the improvements in many areas, just felt like a disappointment on the first playthrough. And I'm mostly concerned with how they're going to balance it going forward, because like I was trying to point out in my wall of text above there are a lot of ways to go about fixing the problems. Josh said in some interview I watched, that they like to balance by making everything crazy and then "tuning down", which to me sounds like there's going to be a massive wave of nerfs. Personally I would prefer them going the buff the mobs, add more of them and redesign encounters to be tougher route. Also honestly I think some extra late game content is needed, but I guess that'll come in the form of DLCs. I'm fairly sure you should always have a couple of "WTH?" fights in the game as side content. But we'll see what they end up doing.

So finished the game yesterday and I feel like Deadfire actually made me realise how much the combat mechanics really matter and I am honestly quite disappointed with the whole game because of this. I think I've always played RPGs on the hardest difficulty, because it makes the challenge in the story more real to actually experience the struggle for yourself so I feel like the lack of difficulty also works to water down the atmosphere of the game, making the stakes feel lower. It also makes rewards like levels and items feel worthless, because you don't need the upgrades. I gave my party combat scripts after reaching lvl 10 then proceeded to fast mode through the game on PotD and crit path scaling on. I think after that there was one fight in the southeast corner of the map where I actually had to give input because of domination. One fight in the whole game after leaving Neketaka where I personally engaged with the game mechanics on the hardest difficulty. For the player that means you could just as well remove fights from the game and nothing would change. I mean I literally did the dishes while watching my party destroy the final boss on their own without dropping anyone. Sure I could disable AI and fight manually, but if the fights are easy enough for the scripts to do the job, then I'm just going through the same motions as the AI would, and that really isn't very stimulating, not in the way PoE1 is. Altough it also gets very easy later on, but with scaling it still does hold up quite far into the game. Way further than Deadfire at least. Now I don't know if full scaling would've made my experience any different, but I doubt giving mobs a little bit more stats would really change that much, because I feel like the problem is really in the penetration mechanics. Heavy armor just feels completely OP. I mean I purposefully made my PC a helwalker/streetfighter, cause I thought that it would make for some pretty fun micromanaging and tense glasscannon gameplay, which it did, for a time. Then I put him in heavy armor (Reckless Brigandine) and suddenly he was impervious to damage but still hitting like a truck. For me the difference in attack time with all self buffs on between wearing a robe (3.5s) and wearing plate (4.1s) just is nowhere near enough to make up for the difference in durability. By lvl 19 he was unkillable and hitting for 1000dmg (swift strikes + heartbeat drumming cascade) with basic attacks with 4.1s attack time. Is my PC just an example of a fringe OP class? Yes. But I think it highlights pretty clearly what is wrong with the game: he should do a ton of damage, but he shouldn't be able to tank, like at all. And honestly I tested fighting solo with Swashbuckler Eder and he could take on the world alone just as well as my PC, it just took him more time to kill everything. Same problem: legendary plate + legendary weapon = unkillable and enemies explode into red mist on touch. In one of these threads I remember someone saying that healing is the problem with the game, but honestly I didn't seem to need it at all. I could just leave the rest of the party at the entrance and send either frontliner alone to clear anything, even the high level zones, because enemies just simply can't penetrate heavy armor, especially the legendary ones with +armor. No healing needed, everyone is dead way before you are. Another thing people have said is that the difficulty markers make it feel easier because you don't end up in zones above your level. Didn't have the markers on because of scaling and still didn't have any Firkraag/Alpine Dragon moments. Fast mode, flying body parts, loot. Not really sure how I'd go about fixing it though, because as I understand it, everything in the game is universally applied, so if you lower the armor rating or penetration from items for the party you also do so for the enemies and nothing changes. You could just give enemies better gear but then you end up with the TES: Oblivion glass armor bandits ridiculousness and consequently make money meaningless pretty fast. Although maybe you don't give it to trash mobs, and trash mobs just stay trash, but you add more challenging fights into the game, and those enemies are going to have superb or legendary gear? I guess one way to go about it is just raise the stats of all enemies in the game, so they end up critting more and thus penetrating armor. Although I feel like that would make a lot of abilities useless, because there wouldn't be any way to hit them anymore, and it would make accuracy king again. Maybe PotD should just flat out give enemies extra penetration and armor rating too? Altough extra armor would mean damage spells stop working and martial classes are still critting with +20 penetration and nothing changes. But extra pen would solve a lot of problems I think. You could of course just nerf heavy armor by increasing the recovery penalty, but that might quickly turn tanks into slugs tahat never get to use any of their abilities. In the same vein I personally hope they go about balancing by buffing the mobs and not nerfing the player. I think this is what is so cool about a fully modded SCS BG, that it's OP vs OP. You get to feel powerful while being given a good reason to go for the broken builds and hunting for the best items, because the enemies are also ridiculously powerful. Out of the games I've put a lot of hours in, the same thing goes for XCOM and Dota2: intense, sometimes straight up unfair difficulty but the player is also given some pretty OP feeling tools to deal with the difficulty if they have the skill and the know-how. Those games can be frustrating sometimes, but when they feel good, the feel really good. Great rewards for good plays and harsh punishments for mistakes. Maybe they could just do it as a Berath's Blessing? Like Turbo Mode? Or just make PotD live up to it's name. Could also be they just nerf everything until the combat plays like a group of slugs fighting a gang of caterpillars and character building is as interesting as filing your tax return.

Gunner increases reload time instead of reducing it.