Clawdius_Talonious

In an effort to let anyone whose official Obsidian information comes primarily from here or articles, rather than social media, know about this poll while it's ongoing I figured when I saw this I'd post a link here. Poll 1 is closed, results were Cloak: https://twitter.com/WorldofEternity/status/1026514458389008384 Poll 2 is closed, results were Mystic: https://twitter.com/WorldofEternity/status/1026893685722513408 Poll 3 is closed, results were Utility: https://twitter.com/WorldofEternity/status/1027256500178173953 I saw a lot of people who were annoyed that the official Obsidian forum didn't have their own poll when the animancy hunter's bow was touted as a community built item, so I figured that this time around maybe I could help some people offer their own feedback. This is in no way because I chose Ring and feel like there aren't enough awesome rings in Deadfire... Well, maybe just a little. Whatever the community decides is fine, I'll just go over here and make my own ring, with blackjack, and hookers! Edited to add final results and change thread title.

So as I understand it IIRC Troubador has two modes they can chant in, one that doesn't have elapse functions and goes by quickly, and another that has longer lingering effects after the chant ends. In essence you can have two chants giving the party their ability constantly instead of about 75% of the time (normal chant time is like 6 seconds and linger is 3 IIRC) or you can chant more quickly without any chant effects so you can get the last point to cast your summon or what have you. If you're running a chanter as more of an auto attack set it and forget it kind of character who summons something at the start of combat and then you forget about them, then I guess Troubadour will let you benefit most from the chants themselves rather than the invocations.

I believe this is "working as intended" which frankly, makes Ghost Heart kind of useless. There's almost no reason not to play a regular ranger with a pet who can then summon other things instead.

Bumping this for visibility.

It's definitely Privateering when you're doing ship bounties, which is when you'd basically get a writ from a government to kill their enemies more or less. It's basically just like piracy, but you've got the RDC or Valians or Huana or the Principi behind you in theory. Pirates you can aim at the enemy. The morality of bounties is the same as killing people for money in theory, but in practice my crew just has a very strange captain with a sixth sense on whose head to cut off and carry with them for the next several months. Personally I wish they had given us a magic artifact, and let us sync it with the bounty boards of the Deadfire basically. It would hum when you were near a bounty or something, then there'd be a reason I got out of Port Maje and went on a voyage collecting the heads of certain of my foes. They're all hostile, none try to talk, so it isn't like if you blunder into their camp it's not self defense. The morality of it is a bit muddied that way I guess.

That sounds like it's just some sort of interaction bug, whether or not you have a torch you should be able to click on the Braziers, it just might not have the option to use the torch to light them. I just ran a new character through there over the weekend, so I'm pretty sure it isn't a pervasive bug.

Every couple of levels you get a skillpoint for each class, and those must be spent on skills for those classes. In other words, when you get two skillpoints you have to buy a skill for each class (or at least spend those skillpoints in their tree, you can always select a generic talent on either tree. The only time I've ever been unable to move freely between trees when picking a skill is when it was mandatory that I spend a point in each tree, it sounds like that may be happening to you.

Reporting back in, it seems that the characters who hadn't travelled to Harbinger's lost the erroneous The Higher Ups, I still have two characters who went to Harbinger's Rest and are unable to start The Beast of Winter content, but most of my characters can now complete the content at least. I am not sure what changed, as I had already checked the endgame saves on all my characters and The Higher Ups was displayed and the characters I had brought to Harbinger's were unable to progress. Looking further into it, I simply wasn't displaying completed quests on the two characters I brought into this after the first to exhibit these issues couldn't start The Beast of Winter. This means that now I have three characters, one of whom hadn't ever been to Harbinger's Watch and was only loaded for a moment in the pre-endgame phase to check his quest journal, who cannot progress the Beast of Winter quest line because every quest in The Beast of Winter is being displayed as complete except for The Higher Ups despite these characters having never even been to Harbinger's Watch. I'd be fine with a manual reset command for the developer console so that I could take An Honored Guest and begin the Beast of Winter content on the only characters I had prior to launch that still needed experience to reach the level cap. I can't be sure what on earth caused this initially, nor what caused 3 of the saves previously displaying the symptoms (Higher Ups just being in the quest journal despite these being pre TBoW PRE-ENDGAME saves at least, I don't recall if I manually clicked on display completed twice to make it actually display completed quests upon loading new characters) to no longer have this issue and be able to battle The Messenger properly. Because of the third character, for whom I only had loaded a pre-endgame save and then moved on to the next character like I had for the others that this isn't an issue for any longer, I no longer even have the common thread of "these characters had been to Harbinger's Watch prior to whatever fixed this having happened." That puts my own personal tally at 3 characters who can't progress The Beast of Winter, and 3 characters who can. And one who I created after The Beast of Winter was released to test whether a new character had any issues. If there wasn't any sort of patch released on Sunday (and that seems likely), the only thing I did that might have had any effect on whatever this is was starting a new character. I don't know how or why that would have changed anything, but I also don't know why saves that have existed and not been altered since well before The Beast of Winter launched all now display TBoW quests as having been completed... If it sounds like providing these characters saves might be useful I'm happy to upload them, but since the glitch is game wide I can't provide anything like a before and after because there is no before since this bug is displayed on even my oldest saves on every affected character.

Thanks for the update Morning Glory, although it leaves me with a less defined concept for what exactly this bug is and what indicates you have it (besides Vatnir being unresponsive during his introduction video.) I'll have to try to initiate the video several more times on different characters and make sure that I'm unable to get lucky and have the quest progress properly (even if it displays as completed.) When i set out to report this issue I had thought it would be as simple as a before and after save, but if it can affect people who haven't beat TBoW content, then that indicates that it is even more rare and therefore that much more difficult to reproduce. Whatever this is seems to affect the entire game, and every extant save prior to the release of TBoW, so I don't think that any files I have would really be helpful in diagnosing or addressing it. That said if I'm mistaken I'll happily provide any files that may help, at the very least I have a character who hasn't fought the messenger and yet mysteriously reports every single quest in TBoW as complete if that could be useful? Most of the affected seem to have completed The Beast of Winter, upon which they were unable to bring any previously extant characters to Harbinger's Watch and have Vatnir's introduction play properly. I've brought a character created after the release of 2.0 to Harbinger's Watch and successfully encountered the Messenger, so while this does appear to affect all the older saves it doesn't seem to bleed over into new save games. Edit: Update - Loading pre-endgame saves etc. seems to trigger the quests properly, and my characters aren't showing The Higher Ups as a side quest long before they could possibly have gotten it. The more prevalent of what may be two different issues may have been addressed? If so that just leaves me with one character whose time spent with this bug exacerbated the condition beyond recovery.

I mean, Rymrgand isn't in any danger in the long term, the other Gods say Eothas would just reform eventually if they smote him down in the main plot. That's the best non-DLC-spoilery way I can think of to answer this.

You always have the Yenwood fragments, the only one that isn't always there in your cabin is the Blade of the Endless Paths, and you can set that when setting up a game state for new games in the options.

I've got the same issue, and so do several others. https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/104395-beast-of-winter-journal-entry-oddities-stops-beast-of-winter-progress/ It appears that this can even happen to people who haven't done any TBoW content to some extent, although that person was able to get Vatnir to trigger properly by retrying from the PRE-DLC save. It seems to be a fairly rare issue, but it's quite frustrating because other than starting a new character we can't play The Beast of Winter content until this is addressed somehow. I guess, if we're just a few people who get this, and they manage to address it some other way there might be a console command we could use to reset the quests manually? It would remove the ability to get achievements on that save, but we're probably past the need to log achievements (I mean, I know I am).

The initial info blurb about it says "‘Seeker, Slayer, Survivor’ available in September 2018, is a combat-focused expansion taking place on a previously undiscovered island that will challenge the martial prowess of your party, and your tactical skills as a commander, as you embark on a mission to rediscover ancient relics, and pit your party against Eora’s most skilled and savage." which doesn't indicate to me that we'll be gifted with a ton of stuff to explore. It sounds more like we'll uncover some kind of competition, and as I understand it there's some reason to imagine a lot of this DLC will be a sort of arena style battle with progression through different enemies. That said, I'd love to be wrong, we've got an entire island to explore and that could mean a variety of locations that aren't essential and the potential for exploration. A network of caverns or something like that could potentially let us navigate warrens beneath the island, sneak poison into other competitors supplies and gain an unsportsmanlike advantage in these fights. I'm always down for some exploration in these sorts of games, and I'd really love to see a variety of locations that were a sort of "pick one of 3, blocking off access to the other 2" sort of exploration even if that meant that for people looking for one specific magic item that they would be kind of forced into picking their correct path to get it. I can understand why that sort of content is tough to balance and feels frustrating when people find out they could have gotten X that they wanted when they chose another path and got Y they didn't care about... I'm not entirely sure what we can expect, but I don't think we'll be seeing a ton of exploration in any of these DLC packs, which if that is the case will be a real shame. If anything, The Forgotten Sanctum sounds like it has more potential exploration in it than SSS, going mostly off of the name alone. TFS sounds like it could be a giant dungeon, which is something I've always got a fondness for. SSS seems more like it's just going to be a Galawain themed competition, but I may be reading too much into suppositions I've seen on this forum and such. Hopefully there's at least a bit of content in SSS that scratches the optional exploration itch.

I mean, I haven't excluded the companions and sidekicks by not taking them or killing them off. That said, I am relatively certain that once you have the... I want to say 8? Once you have 8 allies the game can bring into battle if you only have those 8 or however many then the game will bring them in reliably. In theory you could make 8 adventurers 1 level below you who were all Chanters and they would all bring in their highest level summons almost as soon as the battle started. The way experience works, though, it seems to just give you a lump sum and bring up the bottom line with a predetermined number. This means you can have 8 or 16 party members to choose from and they'll all get the same amount of XP from quests they aren't around to benefit from directly. That second hand XP might change, but if it does it's a subtle effect compared to "who do you have in your party when you turn in the quest" which has a more pronounced effect on how much XP they receive from quests. I've got a level 20 character whose allies aren't all level 19, so they could definitely hire a bunch of level 19 adventurers and presumably get all their companions and sidekicks killed and then everyone will be at least level 19. Since the highest level adventurers you can hire is always going to be 1 level under the PC and the bottom line of XP distributed among your crew seems to lag behind by more like 2-3 levels compared to your PC you could potentially see some short term benefits from murdering your other allies and hiring on some bloodthirsty adventurers. The main thing is just to go to a tavern regularly, and swap out your crew in the tavern dialog, so you can level everyone up and double check their equipment to make sure they're using the best stuff you have laying around for them. If you haven't leveled an ally since they were level 6 they'll basically stay level 6 until you do, and then if they're pulled onto ship combat they're practically dead weight.

Is the game generating crash dumps? If not it's going to be hard for them to suggest a fix, have you tried validating files if you're using the version on Steam?

I feel the need to point out that, even if you don't feel like gathering companions and sidekicks, you can hire adventurers to supplement your allies in these battles. On characters where I flesh out my actual party with adventurers I feel far more viable far earlier than on characters where I just take what I can find. You can make really well built allies by hiring adventurers, and pure chanters summons can really tip battles in your favor. The right synergies make certain multiclass builds extremely viable, and you can have as many as you want (although you only bring a handful of allies with you into ship battles and it's randomized. I'd personally rather they let me define boarding/defense parties in the ship HUD, maybe displaying all the potential party members and letting you highhlight which ones are most effective in battle so you don't have to just level everyone and keep everyone as well equipped as you possibly can). The problem, in my experience, with ship battles is that it's hard to tell just which ship battles will let you bring a bunch of allies into the fight and which battles are just your party vs the enemy. I'm at a loss to explain why sometimes I get allies who aren't in my immediate party and sometimes I don't. Balance reasons I know, but given that you're e.g. fighting fire giants and if you lose then presumably your entire ship is going to be scuttled, it always seems super weird when everyone else on my ship says they'll be belowdecks drinking to my good health instead of contributing to the fight.

Being a pirate is purely optional, Eld Engrim is a god fearing man who likes the drink, probably more than he should. He's no pirate, and none of the other starting crew are pirates really, more a ragtag band of misfits. You can even avoid fighting against most pirates, if you don't want to fight pirates, just fly a Principi flag after you defeat one. Alternately, acquire a flag from Derio The Lean, although you'd be doing a quest for the Principi at that point. Piracy is really sorely lacking in PoE2:Deadfire since you can only burn ships to the waterline, and not send over a prize-crew and take them to a port to sell. That said, there are no factions that care in any demonstrable way about piracy, you can complete every Bounty in the game for every faction in the game. This was a design choice, sort of like Bethesda letting you ascend to lead pretty much every guild in Skyrim at once. No one ever says "We've got reports of you attacking _______" or anything along these lines, ever. Even so, the lack of repercussions for an action doesn't mean you're being forced into that action even if it's wildly profitable. It's like stealing in a Bethesda game, I do it on pretty much every character because it's wildly profitable and there aren't a lot of down sides to it but that isn't the game encouraging me to be a thief. It's just the minmaxer in me who says "Hey, I know where we can get some sweet loot if we can be stealthy!" and since you're not saying PoE2:Deadfire makes you play as a thief I assume that you didn't feel pressured to steal things that weren't nailed down here. Maybe you're right, and at some level you had presupposed that you would inevitably be a pirate, and it shaped your experiences. In every single ship combat you can turn tail and run if you want, you're never forced to attack ships that aren't hostile or even fight the ones that are (and as I said, with a Principi flag even the pirates will leave you alone.) At no point that I recall, having played through the game 4X (I have 4 level 20s anyway, a level 19, an 11, and a 9 I've been playing since my 11 and every other preexisting character got glitched out and can't participate in Beast of Winter content) when the crew encourages me to be a pirate aboard my ship. I do recall some shenanigans in an alleyway, but given that piracy is specifically a seagoing affair I'd call that skulduggery. You are approached by a Principi in Nekataka, but you can ignore him. You are told to seek retribution on a pirate, but you could ignore that, or you could kill every pirate in the place instead of engaging in any of the more thoughtful quest design at that location. I've never felt like I was being forced into any particular action by my crew, they certainly didn't like me going aboard plagueships or whatever crazy notions I had. In most of my games I kept the crew from Port Maje the entire game, adding a few characters I found in my voyages. I feel like a far more valid complaint about PoE2:Deadfire is that the piracy aspect of the game is fairly shallow, actually playing a pirate means you can kill every named ship in the Deadfire and there just aren't many randomized enemies for you to take. I'd love to see some bit of DLC or a patch that made a Valian Adra Train which necessitated several chained ship battles to capture. I'd also like a trading minigame, a new classification of goods as "trade goods" which had no purpose other than being bought and sold at ports for profit, so there was something besides piracy that you could do with your boat to make money. It takes a lot of effort to do a responsive economy, but a list of ports and the prices they offer is much less complex and never changes due to your influence. I can see why it wasn't a priority, but I feel like it would add at least a little of that feeling of "Wow, what a great haul!" to piracy that is missing now and could potentially explain why so many people are seeking their fortune in the Deadfire. Maybe all of this is just due to me thinking that a new merchant ship in the Deck of Many Things DLC meant a new ship for the players to acquire, suited to being a merchant. I love a great many things in Pillars 2 individually, but right now there's a tendency toward feeling like it's a pile of blocks rather than something that's constructed purposefully. There are glimmers of what Pillars 2 could have been with a larger budget, with more time to flesh out the sailing and ship combat aspects of the game. I hope that we do see something that fleshes out these aspects a bit more, similar to the way the keep events in Pillars were added to make Caed Nua feel like a keep you were leading and not just a really expensive place to rest occasionally. I personally have yet to play an out and out pirate, although I've never seen anyone say anything about randomly generated vessels being added to the mix if you build up enough negative rep with a faction. Apologies if I missed something that makes piracy more worthwhile than just being able to attack every Deadfire Merchant you see. I look forward to seeing Matteo's conclusions on what made them feel like they were being urged toward piracy after they give Pillars 2 another shot.

Here's a screencap of the stats of the weapon if anyone's still curious about that aspect of it. New game allows you to find the bow confirmed.

I had a 35 floating in red the entire time I was playing Beast of Winter. I wrote it off as like, me taking damage out of combat, my soul eroding inside the Vytmadh. But yeah I guess this is probably a fairly common new issue post 2.0

Tell Xoti to give up the souls during the ritual in Neketaka, definitely don't have said anything like she should hold on to souls. If she gives up the souls to the pillar she will be goodly, but she can still release them at a pillar and be evil depending on your conversation options with her. Don't ever tell Xoti that she should hold on to souls, and avoid the obviously evil kinds of answers, and you shouldn't have a lunatic evil Xoti in my experience. Some of the darkside answers could be seen as a sort of "think for yourself" kind of philosophy instead of really evil, but since there is only a lightside or darkside outcome middle ground stuff ends up being darkside answers IIRC.

This is on the same character who initially completed the DLC, Morning Glory? So you did the DLC, then had to reload the Pre-DLC save and continue from there and already had the journal entries? Interesting, so this problem isn't just for people who've completed the DLC on another character necessarily, even the same character could encounter issues after beating the DLC. The -only- character I have that doesn't have erroneous journal entries is the character I first did the DLC on, he's clean when I load the Pre-DLC save, at least in the journal sense. I haven't brought him into town to see how Vatnir responds, I just looked at it this morning when I was curious if all of my characters were indeed affected or if this was just for characters who existed prior to beating the DLC with one character. I've started a brand new character, who has no journal issues at all, but I didn't really feel like going through Port Maje again so I'll report back if I do end up going back to it and seeing if I can even start the DLC on a new character.

Do you mean pass a day after going to their map? I've played through the entire TBoW content on that character, subsequent characters are bugged and can't go through it for me now (though I guess I could check to see if the Port Maje vendor has anything new for me on them). He's definitely been back in the Deadfire post 2.0 for well over a day but I did just get to Port Maje from Harbinger's Watch.

Even if you mean after the first battle omgFIREBALLS mentions, you get the loot when you leave the map after the other fight, it should be automagically placed in your inventory. If you're looking for it before that, I think it just happens that way IIRC. Didn't look at or notice anything about the bestiary but I never really read the beastiary entries. Just in case anyone searches and finds this, it's actually dropped in an object after you're outside that room.

Port Maje is where it's purported to be, haven't gotten it myself. I went to Henric's Shop in Port Maje which is where it's supposed to be AFAIK, on the character i did TBoW content on and he did not have the bow. Otherwise I'd post the stats too.

Yeah, I finished the content on one character, tried to bring in others and something weird is going on now game wide for pre dlc characters, although I haven't checked on what happens quest log wise on a new character. I have a... half dozen or so characters, a level 20 I beat TBoW with and 3 more 20s and the two who I currently have at Harbingers unable to progress.