morhilane

You wanted it to be called Glowy hands? It is called Hands of Light because it envelope people in light (based on the description, never tried it in the beta). I'm not sure why Bleak Walkers Paladin shouldn't use it though, the fact that they are merciless mercenaries that leave a deathfield everywhere they go doesn't mean that they are masochists and fearless (Hands of Light is an upgrade to Lay on Hands, it adds the Courageous inspiration). I think they're referring to the name of the ability more than the attributes of it. Bleak doesn't mean dark...

You wanted it to be called Glowy hands? It is called Hands of Light because it envelope people in light (based on the description, never tried it in the beta). I'm not sure why Bleak Walkers Paladin shouldn't use it though, the fact that they are merciless mercenaries that leave a deathfield everywhere they go doesn't mean that they are masochists and fearless (Hands of Light is an upgrade to Lay on Hands, it adds the Courageous inspiration).

But this isn’t a MMORPG. I fully understand the DPS solo play of the MMORPG. POE is a completely different type of monster. Game type has nothing to do with why people pick mostly DPS classes and why they mostly play humans. It's psychological.

I don't see what "hands of light" has to do with religions. Anyway, I think the OP is mixing religions and gods. All Paladin order in Eora are devoted to and hold certain things sacred, those things might not be related to an official practiced religions, but that doesn't mean they are any less "holy" to the Paladin order. Like the Goldpack and their contracts.

I always try to play an unusual class and after getting my ass kicked a few times in the first fight, I start over as a fighter (or a rogue so I can scout ahead and don't get stumped by traps or locks). I'm doing it right now in the Deadfire beta. If you have to count on magic protection and good attacks that run out mid fight you have no choice but to hang back. That's a little like you're in the game's game if you know what I mean. I look for characters that promise exciting interesting play and storyline. I don't play dwarves because they are (traditionally) slow and don't feel different enough to be compelling in spite of that. I've played Godlike in PoE but (I don't think) you can change the appearance so it hasn't become my thing. Everyone who plays is playing the same character and that doesn't appeal. I don't think I've ever played a human in an RPG. I've also never played as a white dude though I do in fact make the character resemble me as much as possible. I currently have 3 play throughs as a dwarf. A Barb, a Battle Priest of Magran and a Chanter (Solo). I love Dwarves. Borreals for exceptional DPS builds and Mountain Dwarves for more of a RP/Story experience. BGEEs brought us Dwarven Defenders. Played that class first upon the EE releases. I have 3 close friends who played PoE, they all played at least one completed game with a dwarf. I guess they can track metrics these days via Steam and what have you but that they are saying no one plays dwarves and no one plays Priests seems very odd to me. It doesn't seems odd to me. Play any MMORPGs and watch how many DPS they are compared to tank and healers (answers: healer and tanks are super rare) and the race distribution: dwarf is always at the bottom.

The only thing they owes me as a backer is at least one more backer update, instead of just the release one.

More like how? and I'm going to bet that Dev A "copy-pasted" the old code for Carnage to the new modal Blast/Citzal's Spirit Lance/Minor Blights and then a bit later Dev B changed Carnage but nobody realized that others were using the old code. And now "fixing" is not a priority compared to adding the new features and fixing more major bugs.

Good point. I guess you could solve it either by (a) making damage bonuses flat bonuses or (b) making armour give % damage reduction instead. I guess one of my main problems with the new penetration system is it feels clunky. Compare "subtract DR from damage roll to obtain damage done" to "if your penetration is below the enemy's armour you do X% damage, if it's equal or greater you do full damage and if it's twice or more you do Y% damage". It feels like a fix that's been thrown at the problem and it leads to weird break points where a single extra point of penetration can increase damage dramatically. You shouldn't even think about the maths, unless you are trying to mix/max every situations. Technically, the game would be balanced with every weapons having the upper hand against certain enemies and the lower hand against others and having a good balance of these creatures over the course of the game. And by that I mean a hatchet is going to be crap against a beetle, but it is going to be good against a Delemgan, instead of the the hatchet is crap against everything or the game being filled by beetles and there being just 3 Delemgan. Unfortunately, Josh asked the encounter design team to put Monk and Wizard in "plate" to show it was possible, so expect every enemies to require high penetration because of crap balance planification...

People criticised it. As far as I can tell those criticisms took two forms: (i) that it was difficult to understand and (ii) that along with the graze system it resulted in lots of hits doing tiny amounts of damage (apparently a lot of people prefer to miss than to hit for a tiny amount). And then they got back their miss-a-lot in Deadfire beta 1 but still complained about it because what they really want is big numbers all the time and to kill everything in 1 seconds. Although, the issue Josh mention is mostly that people complained it was too hard to understand. Which I always replay with "Do people who bought BG2 without any D&D knowledge understand THACO?" The answer is no. POE1 DR system is easier to understand than THACO and it doesn't need knowing any maths about it either, just that higher = better. On top of that, mechanically it worked, what did not work is the balance. That happened because it was using % for damage increase instead of flat numbers while DR was flat numbers, end results: high damage weapons hit even harder and made armor useless while small damage weapons hit saw almost no improvement and with grazes you got a whooping 1 damage regardless if someone was wearing armor or not. Deadfire is slightly better because the AR/Penetration system is a % damage reduction. The issue with it is how the balance is done between weapon penetration and armor AR.

Agreed. I've heard at least once that they changed the system because people found the old system hard to understand. I'm really not sure how this system is easier to understand, and honestly I suspect most people who found it hard to understand were struggling with the fact it's not a D&D AC system. Did the old system have some problems? Sure. But this new one seems to have at least as many. With the D&D AC system you have nothing to think about, armor type is class limited (either by proficiency or armor type disabling class abilities). If it wasn't class limited, everyone would be running in the armor type that afford the highest AC once they get the money to buy it (technically still do, the highest is just based on your class). All armor systems end up with "use best or don't use any" unless you force people to use something specific via class proficiency or bonus/malus. The Deadfire system actually has less issues then POE1 version, it's just balanced like crap (like most of the game it seems).

Support Woedica, replace Thaos! It would be funny if that is what would happen in the ending if you did. Now that I think of it, I totally need to do a playthrough that support Woedica...

All my beta ship to ship battles ended with the enemy ship running away. I actually like the mini-game though, but then my impression of these forums is that I like what others don't like about the game, lol.

True, but its not openworld. Just world map view is quite a bit more indepth than traditional IE style game. Interactive world maps have been done before, albeit to in that exact form, and game still focuses on tight, prerendered, handcrafted locations. I would hope storytelling adn design will be tighter than in PoE1, as now when calm, repetitive exploring has been moved to overworld map, the locations themselves should be more impactful. Well, I think the term open world is a bit of a misnomer anyway. Basically, semantics aside, it just refers to a huge game world with a ton of side quests, and the impression that the player has freedom to do what they want - farm, pick flowers. So what I hear of Deadfire it does essentially fall into that category, maybe not officially but close enough. Problem with open world games is invariably the plot suffers - its absolutely impossible to have a tight, focused story in an open world environment. I'm not strictly against open worlds - I still fire Skyrim up occasionally but I expect different things from different gaming companies - and with Obs I expect a better than average writing. You are confusing sandbox ("do whatever you want" simulations) with open world (large map with none-linear content, note here that the map can be split into smaller areas with loading). Pretty much all sandbox are open world, but not all open world are sandbox (example The Witcher 3 is not a sandbox game, but it is open world). Deadfire just has a large map with none-linear content like POE1, KoTOR2, BG2, etc did. The only difference is that you move the ship at sea instead of just loading the next area you clicked on.

I though it was evident that the delay was because Josh decided to add beta feedbacks (might/strength/resolve changes, combat speed changes, interrupted behavior, buffing a few single class, etc) after the original release date was given and these changes are taking time to do and introducing bugs along the way so more bugfixing is required.

Going by how she is pretty much the go-to to answer Deadfire narrative/story questions (outside of Josh who as director knows a lot too), I suspect she is the primary writer for the game.

Seems like the official decisions being made was to delay Deadfire to May 8th. Which means we now have enough time for a beta update...if they release one.

Josh talked about been deep in bug fixing a few days ago and I had a hunch the game was going to be delayed after I read that. Also, the lack of beta 4 when they were making major changes here and there always looked risky to me. Also, yeah! Now I have enough time to finish the games I started since January I haven't finished yet before I switch to other game after a few weeks...>.> I have a problem.

Accuracy/damage (+penetration in Deadfire) are increased via Transcendent Suffering passive(s) which is auto-granted in both games to the Monk class. It act as weapon quality enchantements for fist. The elemental (and other) bonuses you can gain are applied to all the (melee?) weapon(s) used by the Monk. The real issue is the lack of enchanted gear that affect unarmed strikes, there is like one item in POE1 and it requires White March part 1.

You know, the more I read through these things the more I'm happy about my decision to don't bother. I have really little time for playing nowadays, so I kinda drifted towards the comfy zone of having fun without having a challenge. So this means I will probably set Deadfire on story/easy mode and wear whatever I want, as long as it suits my playstyle. Mediocre light armor that looks cool on my character? OK. Welcome to the bright side of fun: no stress, no fuss, low micromanagement and no fashion haters.

OMG, I don't want to think what kind of telemetry data I sent back to Obsidian. I had entire party wiped just to check stuff about enemies and AI. I used the cleric as a offtank while in leather with the staff/greatsword because why not. I used the monk without weapons, because someone covered in gold (goldpack multiclass) that punch things in the face is hilarious.

It's going to be more exhaustive than ME 2, it only allowed you to pick the major main story decisions, that's why a bunch of people were dead by default. Josh said there is very few things in an imported saves that you can't set manually via the UI in Deadfire.

I'm baffled that some countries tried to hide the word ninja. Not too surprised it happened back in the late 80s/early 90s when their popularity was at its peak, it wasn't just the turtles. Ninjas were the fad back then.

But it involves meta knowledge to be able to recruit the companions right off the bat in BG2. So when you have meta knowledge of Deadfire, I'm sure you will be able to do lots of things in "optimal order", just as you can in for example BG2. Hope so, i remember that in poe, the first time i played it, i decided i wanted to ger pallegina as soon as possible, but still it took a lot. If you go straight through (picking Aloth, Edér, Kana and Durance along the way) the only bottleneck to Pallegina is clearing Caed Nua to open access to Defiance Bay and doing a small quest. In fact, once you open the way to Defiance Bay, you have access to all the companions, you just need to find them.

Later than most modern RPGs? Yes. Later than the games POE models itself after? Not at all. What? In bg2, imoen aside you can get the vast majority of the companion as soon as you step in atkathla... That's.. 30 minutes? Outside Jaheira, Minsc, Yoshimo and Aerie which are available in chapter 1, the rest are available in chapter 2 which give access to like 90% of the content of the game. If you can finish the circus quest, Nalia's keep, hunting down Valygar, the Temple of the Unseen and freeing Haer'dalis in 30 minutes...I'll say you are cheating.

Late, no, not at all. I'm used to games of this type having companion recruitment right at the start of the last act of the game, so getting everyone in the first third looks super fast to me. lol.