Clawdius_Talonious

Events are eventuating!

This method is obscene! Just a couple of minutes indeed. But since I have Rekke use two-handed weapons and I'm finishing the game, I'll cheat this way to check what are all the effects of the shield. Don't kink shame my watchers. Some of them like to roll around in fetid corpse piles, okay?

So, Wael's request of the Watcher is that they send the souls off into the unknown. That seems like the sort of thing you're looking for? I mean, Wael's request doesn't come in until you have already pledged to some other god e.g. Hylea, and in order to do as he asks you'll be annoying that other god. Still, there is an unanswered question that you can get an answer to, and if I'm interpreting what you're saying correctly it seems like that's what you're after.

Wait, was this update written in August? The megaboss appears to be a part of Patch 3.0, which I assume is supposed to be come out on September 25th together with the new DLC. Could have been, especially given that 2.1 is in beta atm and that graphic shows it as releasing in August along with the Abydon and Skaen challenges which are also in the 2.1 beta that is just now available. Of course, it's plausible that they might delay parts of the free patch stuff in order to get the DLC out... Hard to say how inaccurate this graphic is.

I mean, provided the idea of kind of gaming the system doesn't bother you, you can do what I do. Go wallow with some rotting corpses in the undercity of Neketaka and you can get 100 afflictions in a few minutes of idle time. Until this bug is addressed you could always just get 100 that way and leave the other item unsullied by these artificial conditions.

Very small things, whether an NPC is in a location (the doctor from the sanitarium is in the Soul Spire provided he lived, the leader of the Iron Flail is in the temple of Gaun if you let him live but I think that's available as an option in legacy creation IIRC) so all the broad strokes seemed to be available if you create a legacy instead of importing a game. That said, I've only played imported characters to completion so I may have overlooked something or not realized subtle changes. I had six or seven characters to import from and have like nine games in Deadfire so for the most part I've imported different characters and the differences between them were all fairly subtle. Of course, the legacy I created, one where I empowered Woedica (I always ended up not feeling like a character would want to do that by the time I got to the end of the game) is a character I just started and haven't really played past Port Maje so I'm really just speaking by the number of answers I gave in the creation of the legacy vs changes I noticed in the characters I have played to level 20.

IIRC the one I liked best was something like "Ohhh, I don't know that I'm on the right path, I just fake it to convince idiots to follow me."

I've had a lot of ships called The Defiant or Junk, but when I actually named them it depends on the character name usually. On Auroch I had the Aurora, on Claudius I had Tide's Talons, on Talon I had Cape's Claws, that sort of thing.

AFAIK no specific release date has been announced for SSS, so the latest information I've seen on that was "September" which probably means latter half of September given no specific date announcement (unless I'm mistaken it would at least be atypical for Obsidian to announce a release date anything shorter than 2 weeks away). The delay of The Beast of Winter into August may have pushed SSS back into early October at the latest, that depends on a variety of factors I'm not privy to. The Steel Preacher party IIRC can be split (very slightly, pulling most of the party without 1 add I think) and is usually more a long fight than a difficult one in my experience, I wouldn't say he was more difficult than the other steel golems. Like I said I think the last time I did it on PotD was at level 12, difficulty adjustments might make it harder since it was a three red skull fight at that time and I'm really not sure when the iron golems started hanging up instead of doing their AOE which made them way easier than intended or indeed if that even affected steel golems. I'd take a crack at it at 12 anyway, you'd be able to gauge how much more power you needed and if you could get there with consumables... If you're going Rogue and you're planning to use a large shield, the Soulbound shield in The Beast of Winter content is pretty nice and not hard to level if you're willing to stand around in the Undercity of Neketaka for a bit after you take 1000 damage. There's another tier past that to level that I haven't achieved on any character so far (not because it was insurmountable so much as by then I was done with all the content in TBoW and hesitant to knock down Nemnok/Splintered Reef on characters that didn't already do that just in case they increase the level cap.) I tend to use a shield on Rogue melee characters because of the riposte ability, I'm not sure how much DPS it actually adds or anything, but I love the concept and have yet to feel like it was a bad decision. The Large shield that IIRC comes from the Nemnok fight has bonus deflection as you lose health and might actually be better if it counts as shield deflection and adds it to Reflex as well, it depends how often you activate The Wall I imagine. It sounds like you have a pretty good idea of what to expect and what you want to acquire gear wise, in Pillars I would often e.g. go to the burial island for the +3 Might ring, or feel like I was missing out when I forgot it was there and ended up doing everything else before it. I never really felt that "Doh!" moment, like one piece of gear could have made a lot of things I had done previously easier if I had sought it out earlier. Part of that could be because much of the content in the base game is arguably too easy, or definitely -was- too easy (I think we're getting a patch before SSS releases, and the base content difficulty and scaling and such has all been increasing difficulty to be more in line with what I expected at launch) but I don't see anything that jumps out at me that I'd -have- to have early for a Barbarian/Rogue. Then again, all of my characters in Pillars 1, every single one killed Harmke and just about all of my characters use imported games. My point being that I didn't even realize Devil of Carroc breastplate was a thing until I saw it in the outfits thread. I don't mind, the Reckless Brigandine is pretty easy to get and comparable, you can make enough noise to pull the monsters in that location to one of the side hallways and I usually snag that at level 7 or something that usually feels ridiculously low (it's usually the first Exceptional tier gear I get.)

Steel Preacher on PotD is probably a level 12 or so fight IIRC, but on normal it will be easier and YMMV. Got the season pass? There is a case to be made for going to Harbinger's Watch and getting at least to the armor set there, and what you can get or should get otherwise varies a lot. I mean, I am sure Magran's Teeth has some sweet gear, but what you want for a chanter whose using dual pistols and a rogue whose build uses a melee shield combo is going to affect what I'd recommend. I think for a more precise answer we will need your party composition preference, character build and class, difficulty... You're relying entirely on instinct or guesswork otherwise, I have gone through the game to completion 6x myself already not counting times I ran for the end of gold greed and guts, while it was bugged. I have two or three more that have gotten to the point where I plan to try to drive them through SSS... I think that gives me both more favorite bits of gear and fewer must haves in a way. Nemnok for instance is a hard bit of content and yet has some amazing gear on offer. If you are a quarterstaff user it goes up on priority to level 16 or so. A lot of this will change after the new dlc comes out, there is a fair amount of content you can do at 20. I am going to sleep but I will check back and chime in if that seems useful based on any new info you provide.

If the bug is still in the game, and you haven't been to get Ydwin from the Soul Spire you can take Pallegina with you when you go to get Ydwin and say the racist remark over and over (IIRC it procs the achievement in the conversation so just say it until you see it) and Pallegina will have negative rep every time. If that bug was fixed though, I'm not really sure what to recommend. I looked over the tech support forum and my old posts (I thought I confirmed/thanked whoever posted the bug, since it got me the achievement) and I don't see who originally posted it so I'm not 100% sure how long ago it was that I saw that post and did this.

The Spine of Thicket Green now has to be wielded to come up in the interactions from what I saw the last time I did this. I kind of like that, because I had just happened to steal everything that wasn't nailed down in my first run through the game and I killed all the daughters and then there was all this dialog about a staff I just happened to have laying around, which would arguably be back on my boat. Nothing I've ever seen or done has prevented me from seeing the interactive tree bits as interactive when I use tab, but then again if you're playing on Expert that may not be the case, I can't speak to that. I can say that I've killed all the guardians and the daughter associated with a tree and then interacted with it, cleansing the tree and getting a remark on how it was perhaps less than ideal that I had already killed the guardian of the tree. I did notice that my druid/chanter wasn't triggered as an option to purify every tree the most recent time I did this, I used her for the first tree and equipped the Spine of Thicket Green in an alt weapon slot and used that for the rest. I did actually look for and not see the option to use the druid in one of the subsequent events, IIRC I figured I'd go for the same druid option on every tree and just equipped the Spine to make sure that it was just having it equipped that had changed. I will say, if the spots don't highlight when you hit tab, they're odd and small bits on the trees that I wouldn't normally expect to be interactive. You'd think it'd be the entire tree, or a big chunk of the lower half, and it's more like a niche between two root sections kinda in the dirt more than on the tree.

Gods I know what you mean, even that Marksman's ring kinda sorta makes sense not having them in every shop despite the number of guns in the Deadfire. But simple cloaks of greater deflection, or those old bracers of greater deflection from the first game... None of that made it into the Deadfire. If I could go spend my 800,000 gold in the Dyrwood and bring back shipments of commonplace enchanted gear, some folks in the Deadfire would pay me a handsome profit.

What you're finding lacking isn't the game, it's your suspension of disbelief. I can't say why, in a world where you're constantly powering abilities that would be magic in our world, you think that the limits of and definitions of words gives you a reason to complain. It's fine to offer constructive criticism, but you've made up your mind about might. Apparently you can in no way even begin to imagine that e.g. motes of soul energy are naturally drawn to mighty souls giving them both more arcane and physical power. But this is a world where you use your soul energy to fuel everything from a rogue's stepping into the shadows to a wizard casting a fireball or a knight regaining health based off incoming damage. If you can keep suspension of disbelief in the face of the plethora of fantasy concepts and ideas at work in Eora, but you fall down at "I want Might to only mean physical strength!" then I feel sorry for you. If you can't imagine that a 90 year old billionaire in the real world is mightier than you, you have a hard time understanding what power is. If you think that there weren't more wasted threads on this subject than I can even count, well before these things were set back in Pillars 1... you're mistaken. If you're one of those old "Words mean what I say they mean!" crowd back then too, and the idea that they were reconsidering stats for Pillars 2 made you come back now to post... I'd say you're not really a big fan, you just maybe bought the game and came around to whinge that things aren't as you would have them be. But when it comes to words, they're all made up, every single one of them. Every word has a linguistic predecessor, and often times turns of phrase wind up meaning exactly the opposite of what was intended. It happens to phrases routinely, now some are used unironically. Pull yourself up by your boot straps is a good one. It meant "Something that cannot be done" because tug as you'd like, tug all day, you aren't going too pull yourself to your feet by sitting on the ground pulling at your boot straps. The silent majority is a fun one too, because it was originally used to refer to the dead. You probably think you are aware of the idea of a villain, or a thug. Originally Villains were farmers, and Thags were just common laborers. At one time a wife was to be buxom to her husband, but there was no need for an endowment of specific physical attributes, because buxom meant that she would comply with his demands. Etymology is funny that way. That is not to say that I don't understand where you're coming from after a fashion, I loathe when people say something was decimated when clearly more than 10% of it was removed or damaged. Language is alive, and it's constantly shifting, so instead of coming around and blathering about how you would have done it differently... get out there, hop to it, show us your game! I'm always down too play a new RPG. You can even name a stat Perspicacity, or Legerdemain, and I wouldn't even complain in your game's forums if Perspicacity allowed your player character to for all intents and purposes read minds, or if legerdemain is used when someone needs to sew on a button. Our hobby isn't immutable, it's not even set in stone. When people come around willfully ignoring even the idea that there are probably a lot of other threads they could read before they started posting about how they don't like the system having been reverted to something more akin to Pillars... I'm not sure there's anything I could say that would help with whatever it is you feel aggrieved by. If it helps you, picture this: More soul essence means more might in both the spiritual and physical sense. A powerful soul could be a simple farmer, investing the motes of soul energy drawn to him into building more muscle mass. He could learn to move faster, feel less burden under a heavy load, recover naturally without aid from minor injuries... Do you see where I'm going with this? Another Eoran could be a priest, an abundance of soul essence is drawn to him, he looks like he barely eats, his emaciated form gaunt beneath his robes. But when he lets loose on those he considers worthy of his wrath, beating them with a cane or calling down holy retribution on them are both acts of might in the land of Eora. Fictional places can be different than the physical world, or even other fictional works. I read an article about a science fiction author who posited a sort of time travelling interstellar sublight human government. They all froze themselves at regular intervals, thaw for a month, back in the tubes for however many years. Those were the locksteppers, people in space, people on the ground, the vast majority of Human kind had opted to freeze themselves so that they could be alive to see family who made interstellar voyages. The article was about the fact that he was receiving a ton of death threats. People were down right irate that he described a fictional world where faster than light travel didn't exist. I'm not saying you're that kind of person, I'm really just saying, chill out man it's a work of fiction. Fictional characters and universes can do or be whatever, it's okay.

It really depends on the character I'm playing. Sometimes I would want to upgrade my legendary Thundercrack pistol, sometimes I'd want to upgrade my Griffon sword or Modwyr after her sould isn't in it any longer. I'd have to play with it, the Family Bonds ability works when any party member wears Hearth Defenders scale and if the auras would stack that could be an interesting option... This is the sort of decision I agonize over for ages, on each character.

If you want to try Thundercleese's suggestion Op just go down to the old city in Neketaka and frolic in the sickening fetid corpse stink. Takes about 5 minutes to get 100 afflictions.

I never fight the trials in Endless Queries, those fights are optional and can easily be avoided. Fighting gives you motes of anger or whatever anyway, so fighting the trials isn't the optimal way to deal with those encounters. The only fights you have to do in Endless Queries are the fights on the tower map (although you can sneak by the three minotaur dudes at the northern/upper end of the map pretty easily). Optional content like that is probably not a super high priority for balance, and since these fights don't even have a skill requirement or anything, they're really very optional if you're willing to figure out what to say to avoid the fights. Some people probably want harder encounters, and compared to High Abbot Kaoto or whatever from WM2 these monk enemies aren't that big a deal (they at least don't split off copies of themselves, and the Abbot usually managed to create 4 copies of himself before I could take him down.) I know it's not ideal, but there are still probably fairly large balance changes to be made that would render fine tuning of encounters like this a waste of time since fine tuning will still be required after any larger balance passes.

I think this will be the last time I bump this, I updated the title and initial post to reflect the state of the problem for me. Hopefully the workaround suggested by Kindoffer works for everyone else, and if that's not enough they might be able to try what I had to do for the last character to be able to start the Beast of Winter content.

You find that ability in The Bridge Ablaze. The first time I went into The Bridge Ablaze I thought I needed to learn the ability to use them elsewhere, because the first gate in the bridge isn't super obviously passable and there is a beam of light right at the entrance, but I went back and realized that I could continue onward and wasn't being halted by the bridge tower, so I didn't have the need to go learn a new ability elsewhere as I had originally thought after fighting the enemies and thinking I hit a dead end.

Poll 3 is up: https://twitter.com/WorldofEternity/status/1027256500178173953

Confirmed! Disabling Steam Cloud saves and copying all the saves of characters that had completed The Beast of Winter has allowed the character who was getting The Higher Ups and not getting/able to progress Honored Guest no longer has The Higher Ups when I load his PRE-ENDGAME save. Sadly this didn't have any effect on my other two characters, who now all display all of the Beast of Winter content as completed on all of their saves. I can try pulling out newer saves from those characters and see if I can isolate saves that are corrupting the others or something tomorrow.

https://twitter.com/WorldofEternity/status/1026893685722513408 Poll 2 is up for those who are interested.

So I've encountered an issue where I was kind of... the best way I can describe it is out of phase, trapped in an alternate space-time. I couldn't attack the enemies nor could they attack me, nor my summons attack them etc. However! I could easily cast AOE spells to destroy them, primarily the electric AOE priests can buff everyone with, I'd cast that and stand on the enemies until they were dead. I quit the entire game and reloaded the save I had where I was currently unable to walk down a staircase and was instead flying out over the land beneath me. When I loaded the save everything worked fine, so my point is that you can probably AOE things to death and then progress from there without incident if it works (or at least save, quit to desktop, and load and progress from there.) I'd still upload the save so this issue can be addressed, but if you wanted to continue that character this should help.

Amulets and necklaces are both the neck slot in the first game, but in 2 you have a neck slot and a back slot IIRC so you can wear both. Some of the trinkets also appear to be amulets, two of them specifically have dialog about taking them from around someone's neck. The first poll is closed but I'm keeping an eye out for the second, they go for 24 hours apparently and I didn't see the first poll open until a couple minutes before I posted it here, apologies to anyone who comes in between polls or what have you.

Yeah I barely caught it in time myself, and while the item type is almost over there should be two more polls coming that will determine the other aspects of the item. I'll post those links as they come, so even if people miss out on the first poll they should hopefully be able to contribute to one of the others.