Saito Hikari

I've always been looking for games where you can actually be an archer without feeling like you're gimping yourself because the combat was primarily designed for melee/magic combat instead. In that case, the game you're describing is on my radar now. (Also, in the case of Dragon's Dogma, producer Itsuno last week outright said that Capcom already gave him the approval to work on a Dragon's Dogma 2, he just chose to make Devil May Cry 5 first - which heavily hints that DD2 is already in pre-production. When I heard this last week, I got really giddy. I need more Magick Archer in my life.)

Playing Wandersong right now. It's one of the most touching games I've ever played. It's not difficult by any means, but the writing is incredibly good with what the developers are working with. The puzzle design is actually pretty good too, the game doesn't really reuse concepts in its puzzles at all.

One of the major fights in Beast of Winter has jump points as well, which are extremely crucial to utilize (depending on certain choices beforehand that might make them relevant). If you don't use them, it's going to take a while for your melee to rejoin the fight after heading down those paths, which might be especially crippling in turn-based if said melee lack mobility abilities.

You can re-target during other characters' turns by clicking on the casting character's portrait and retargeting from there. It's one of the reasons why you can still pause during TB mode.

Make sure you're playing the Enhanced Edition because the regular edition is a buggy unbalanced mess. Seriously, I didn't realize I was playing the regular edition until I noticed there was a separate listing for Enhanced Edition in my Steam library about 10 hours into my playthrough, and saves are not shared between both versions. Crafting is way stronger in the first game than the second game, assuming you've played the second (you can add gems and stuff to your gear to boost damage/elemental resistances), it's actually used to upgrade/make new gear if you can't find any (something that you can't really do in 2). Have a character that invests in the crafting skills, but make sure to keep gear that boosts said crafting skills around and swap so that you don't invest more than necessary (as I don't believe there are any benefits to going beyond level 5 in a skill in DOS1). Crowd control is super strong but is RNG-based. Having an archer around with charm arrows (which can be crafted via drudanae + arrowheads) makes the early game a lot easier, although you're going to have accuracy problems until you get that one stance skill that boosts your accuracy by a ton. Take advantage of the tons of special arrows you'll find. Late-game, archers get a hilarious shotgun-type spread skill that's probably the most damaging attack in the entire game. Oh, and save. A lot. The first game has a heavy emphasis on (rather badly designed) environmental puzzles (while the second game ditched them for a lot more combat), and the penalty for screwing most of them up is usually instant death via lava or something. And you game over if your two main characters are killed, not a full party wipe like in the second game. --- Currently replaying Dragon's Dogma. Whoever designed Magick Archer needs a raise. Probably THE gold standard for Arcane Archer design. The hilarious part is the dagger-wielding half of the class could have easily been split off into another class in itself. Nothing like setting yourself on fire before going all stabby as a legit tactic. Actually, all of the classes in Dragon's Dogma have rather unique flavors to them, and are all perfectly viable. Very difficult to pull that off for an action RPG.

Seems like a quick fix patch to address the most serious issues that I can get behind. I'm assuming enemy priests still withdrawing for upwards of 4 turns at a time is still a thing, though. But it's not really that big a deal outside of certain ship fights.

Yeah, I think something weird happened, because usually companions should only be one level behind the rest of your party.

So if you take the Eld Nary's Curse upgrade for Chanter (for the tornado bounce spell), the spell takes such a long time to act out that the game allows other characters to take their turns while the tornado is still bouncing around. (My Chanter's turn ends at around the 4th or 5th bounce, and it currently bounces up to 14 times.) While I haven't seen this occur yet, I wonder if things will break very badly if an enemy takes their turn only to end up being killed by the spell mid-turn.

True, but I see many of the same kinds of complaints from other places like the subreddit (and its discord) and dedicated threads from other forums. It's just their current topic there, and outright dismissing legitimate criticism because the forum is known for being a haven for alt-right crap or is full of gatekeepers to the highest degree otherwise isn't going to accomplish much. That, and you can't exactly deny the power these other communities have on the perception of the game. Indeed, the influence of the actual Obsidian forums is pretty minimal, because if we're posting here in the first place, we're probably already rather hardcore anyway. Or the place is an echo chamber. A lot of people think official forums are rather like that. It doesn't help that polls on new items to be designed are held on freaking Twitter of all places, instead of on these forums.

While we're on the topic of Breath's Blessings, I think this should additionally include adding the companion subclasses to the character creation screen for the Watcher to access as well. Consider how Tekehu's subclass disables friendly fire for Water spells. I imagine it'd work if you multiclass for Wizard spells too.

There's a pretty big gulf between 'forced to' and 'wanting to'. Though I will agree that some of the adjustments were really unnecessary and way out there. (The Time Parasite nerf especially, which was pretty bad considering it didn't address the core issue of the buff stacking on itself and the fact that it was only accessible to single class, all it did was reduce values to the point where it cemented Ascendant as being the subclass of choice for single class Cipher, if anyone played Cipher single class at all.) While it appears the main goal of it all was to discourage people from gravitating towards a specific few highly publicized builds that the community may have amplified any thoughts of said builds being 'broken', all it really achieved in the end was people in the wider gaming community outside of these forums constantly slamming the game for the game's classes feeling rather 'samey'. That, and I imagine quite a few people have gravitated away from these forums or have had thoughts of not publishing their builds at all in the fears that the developers will see it and nerf it if it gains too much traction in the community. I've had similar thoughts about speaking of Frostseeker and Time Parasite a bit too much during the first few weeks of release, just to see what happened afterwards. Indeed, the current major topic at the PoE2 thread at RPGCodex is how Ranger doesn't really have an identity beyond 'pet of questionable worth that gives you a huge penalty for allowing it to get knocked out', and that a lot of the classes don't feel different enough.

Well, that's certainly quite a pessimistic way to tell game designers that a lot of their efforts in the smaller details are quite meaningless in the end. A lot of people don't really know how much they enjoy something that might be considered basic or worthless until it gets taken away. Consider the very harsh reaction to the major round of nerfs that happened shortly after release. You could still beat the game after albeit with slightly more difficulty, so were those changes actually worthless? Apparently not, I still see people ragging on the developers for that literally half a year later. Then again, perhaps I'm looking at this from an overall design standpoint, while most people here are looking at this from a personal enjoyment standpoint. They're not mutually exclusive, but the way people talk, you'd think they are. You may not ever bother, but I like to take that design consideration into account when analyzing how different games work as a whole. It's how someone like I who barely discovered cRPGs very recently can actually respect this genre, when most of the other kind of modern gamers that the cRPG community likes to sneer at and engage in gatekeeping with cannot. On a side note, through actual testing, it's fairly apparent that while TB is a thing, the very backbone of the game still runs on the RTwP engine, mainly for the purposes of how the game handles out of combat traversal (though a few bugs I've found during testing does result in RTwP leaking into turn-based combat, namely killing a caster that had just cast a persistent field effect like Chill Fog causes the field effect to be 're-converted' to RTwP rules, inflicting multiple turns worth of damage immediately). It's not a problem at all. If anything, the realization does provide valuable insight into how the game is coded. To most people, this won't mean much, but to people who like to analyze why the mechanics work the way they do without access to the very code itself, it's rather fascinating. Indeed, when you take this knowledge to a different game - let's say, DOS2 - you'd realize it actually works in a similar way with the traversal and how abilities work out of combat. Each 'turn' out of combat there, for the purposes of determining how quickly abilities return from being on cooldown along with buff/debuff/field effect durations, is a specific amount of real time seconds. It sounds suspiciously like how RTwP works, doesn't it? Perhaps Larian already has the infrastructure to create a RTwP mode, if they cared enough. Or someone skilled enough in modding might be able to create it there themselves.

This is what I want to know, because his sthick is getting really annoying. It's all worthless drivel that contributes nothing to any serious discussion of game design. There is one thing that I've found about TB that's actually going to improve my skills when I do another RTwP playthrough. TB slows down the game enough that it makes it very easy to understand how the game's mechanics interact with each other. In the chaos of RTwP, a lot gets lost to the point where I imagine that most players just never pick up on certain concepts, and it's no secret that this game isn't exactly stellar at explaining them either. Indeed, throughout most of my RTwP playthroughs, all I really did was macro my main character and didn't really care much for what the rest of my party was doing. But TB makes things happen one by one (and forced me to optimize/understand how to use each and every single party member), outright showing you what effect your actions/buffs/debilitations have on your rolls without anything else in the background to distract you. One needs to understand that slow is not bad. Also, some mechanics/skills absolutely do have greater importance in TB compared to RTwP, though the opposite also holds true. The Fighter Blackjacket subclass is already considered far more viable in TB compared to RTwP, because you normally get heavily penalized for switching weapons in TB (using a full action to do so). Blackjacket turns it into a free action there, so you now have a literal weapon master that can hit weaknesses and/or swap from melee to ranged all the time with no penalty. Dexterity/action speed is also no longer the be-all-end-all stat in TB, while most RTwP builds stacked it to high heaven (along with many people using the lightest armor possible to survive with). Now in TB, people are more willing to use heavy armor, and many argue that Dexterity is a dump stat since everyone gets an equal amount of actions per turn anyway. Still, I've found a few mechanics that benefit from low initiative in TB (namely Cipher Disintegration ticking twice in one turn if the Cipher manages to cast it before the enemy acts that turn). All in all, the sheer existence of TB mode is really one of the most interesting things I've ever seen in all of gaming. It's not often that games give you such a drastic choice on how to play it, designed drastically different from each other and without either coming off as an afterthought. Seeing what kind of mechanics people value between each mode is quite fascinating, and has already contributed so much to my own understanding of game design.

Indeed. I'm finally getting to the late game spells, and some of the interactions I've found weren't what I expected. In fact, some probably don't even seem intended, particularly Storm of Holy Fire. EDIT: Nevermind, it casts twice no matter which turn Xoti casts it in.

So I found one niche use for having a high dexterity build as an Ascendant Cipher (or high enough). Disintegration damage ticks right when you cast it, and at the start of the enemy's turn. If a Cipher goes early in the turn order and manages to cast it before the enemy target's turn rolls around, they essentially take two ticks in the same turn. I am unsure if this means going first means one extra tick of Disintegration damage, or if it just means the final tick is delayed one turn. Nothing lives long enough for me to really test this. (I also don't think the tooltip for Disintegration is any accurate. It usually says anywhere from 200-450 damage inflicted over 2-4 turns, but I've seen a fully buffed Disintegration tick for upwards of 150-180 damage each, even though the hit result says 450-something damage over 4 turns.)

I had a pretty crazy idea where a hypothetical PoE3 actually had a dual protagonist setup. The Watcher themselves in the present time, and a distant past life, both having their own classes/skills, stats, party members and problems to deal with. A lot of choices made by the 'past life' would affect the present, although said past life not being a Watcher him/herself has to rely on intuition and instinct. (In certain cases, the past life could end up leaving items or even a very unique party member that could be recruited by either party in places for the Watcher's party to find in the present time.) Switching between parties would be done via the rest interface. (I also subscribe to a crackpot idea that the Living Lands is the way it is because it has 'adra portals' of sorts that are somehow connected to every other major region of the world. Over time, the environments from said regions could have bled into the Living Lands and masked said portals. With even more passage of time, the original environments could have changed drastically, while the Living Lands would contain a more pristine version of them. I have zero proof of this, it's just a crackpot thought about why the setting might be the way it is.)

It's not the water, it's the toxic clouds from the piles of bodies that you can see. This was a thing in RTwP too. In certain sections of the map, you're better off having most of your party hang back while sending a single party member to go grab the loot.

I haven't had an opportunity to try to reproduce it yet, but I suppose I'll test to see if it's a consistent bug. If it is, it'll probably apply to all other persistent ground AoE effects too. Poor Aloth is going to be a punching bag.

There is a small unrelated issue I've noticed in regards to such AoEs as well. At one point, I killed a skeleton wizard that had just cast Chill Fog on some of my party members. That Chill Fog was then apparently converted into RTwP behavior, as in my party members suddenly took 3 turns worth of Chill Fog damage at once before the AoE disappeared for the rest of the battle. They lost half their health and were all blinded/flanked without any way for me to react to it. It is rather telling about how these effects are programmed, though.

It's also worth noting that Divinity had incredible marketing. The kickstarter for it meeting its goal in less than 12 hours turned a lot of heads, everybody who backed it was given access to the beta (though I wasn't around for either game's funding campaigns, I've heard people had to back a certain amount to make it into PoE2's beta), and the previous game had very good word of mouth while I've come to understand that PoE1 had rather middling reception in the gaming community at large. PoE2 in comparison... I didn't even know it existed until a friend bought me PoE1 out of a random whim after seeing how I enjoyed DOS:2 so much, about a month before PoE2 was released. DOS:2 being successful because of turn-based is the wrong lesson to take. The environmental manipulation is probably the larger factor that got the game so much attention in the first place (even if it's not really that important in actual practice by endgame because of the stupid armor scaling), as that's something considered revolutionary by overall game standards that isn't seen in other games at all. (That said, I didn't get into CRPGs until very recently, so if a DOS:3 and a POE3 were to exist, I'd back the hell out of both of them.)

So I've decided to set up a thread listing all the observations I've made in my turn-based playthrough so far, if only to get some documentation on things that might end up being really important for bugfixing or strategic reasons later on. I'm going to split this into three categories: skill/class related, specific encounters in the base game, and expansions. My current party consists of the following, on Normal difficulty as well. - Watcher: Ascendant Cipher - Eder: Fighter/Rogue - Xoti: Priest - Aloth: Wizard - Custom: Paladin/Fighter (may reroll Paladin/Monk later, because I've never tried Monk) Skill/Class: Encounters: Expansions: (haven't started any yet, will update when I do)

Okay, I can now actually confirm that reaching level 10 (as single class) bumps up Ascension duration by 1 turn.

I noticed this with Expose Vulnerabilities with Aloth. This typically occurs with him when the cast slips into the next turn and the turn order dictates that he acts again immediately afterwards. It causes the game to think that he already did something that round.

The tooltip in the Priest skill list says +2 turns. I'm not sure if it's influenced by power level or Intellect at all. On a side note, I've noticed that Borrowed Instinct actually lasts a hilarious amount of time by turn-based standards. On a character with 20 intellect at level 8, I was getting the bonus for 6 turns on a hit and 7 turns on a crit. Alas, Cipher has major action economy concerns to consider with how rounds currently work (especially as an Ascendant), but I'd say it's pretty worth it. Playing further, I've come to the conclusion that ascending having such short duration isn't that much of a bad thing (considering how good the lower level Cipher spell list is, how absolutely busted Ectopsychic Echo is in TB if you can set it up right, and you can pretty much ascend in 1-3 turns if you use Frostseeker), but it's still a bit odd how you're highly unlikely to be casting spells that actually cost more focus than the total amount of focus needed to ascend in the first place. Maybe +1 turn of duration is enough.

It is apparently an island area, but the impression I get is that it's a GIANT island or series of islands super clustered together and split by shallow seas/rivers that you can merely wade through, with drastically different environments everywhere. It's probably tied with Yezhua for the most likely setting of the next game because there's a lot of choices/text in Deadfire that seem to point towards it.